


Simon Says

by Hyliian



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: ALL THE FLUFF, Alpha Bucky Barnes, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe, BAMF Bucky Barnes, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, But Low-Key About It, Fluff, Heats and Ruts as Inconveniences, Not Canon Compliant, Occasional POV Bucky Barnes, POV Original Character, Possessive Bucky Barnes, Protective Bucky Barnes, Self-Indulgent, Self-Insert, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, denial is not just a river in egypt, kind of, pretty much entirely fluff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-27
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2019-03-24 12:38:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 26,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13811337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hyliian/pseuds/Hyliian
Summary: Reality…glitched.I wasn’t spontaneously teleported to another place. Monsters didn’t start pouring out of holes in the fabric of time. No otherworldly voice spoke words of wisdom or warning in my ear. Had I… had Ihallucinatedthat whole debacle? Did I justimaginethe world shifting three degrees sideways and tilting diagonally backwards? No oneelsewas reacting to what had happened, so I had to conclude with a sort of grim resignation that I was obviously losing my mind.Resolved to pretend nothing had happened, I took a step towards the door.Abruptly, I was somewhere else entirely.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Because this was getting too long to keep posting in Bite-Sized, so I made it its own work. I'll put any new chapters here instead of in Bite-Sized For Convenience for... well, for convenience.

Reality…  _glitched_.

I had to pause mid-step in consternation as the walls, floors, hell even the  _air_ flickered like a TV with bad reception for about half a second. I peered around cautiously, pretty sure this had to be the start of a bad fanfiction novel or the onset of some sort of  _adventure_ that I resolutely wanted no part of. Reality didn’t tend to just glitch for no reason, after all.

But nothing happened. I wasn’t spontaneously teleported to another place. Monsters didn’t start pouring out of holes in the fabric of time. No otherworldly voice spoke words of wisdom or warning in my ear.

I was still standing in the bathroom at Walmart, hovering with one foot in the air and probably looking like a special kind of idiot to the two other women currently at the sinks. Generously, neither of them said anything about my sudden stillness or odd position. Of course, neither of them were saying anything  _so blatantly_ that they really couldn’t have been more judgmental if they’d turned to me and spat.

I put my foot down, now feeling foolish and more than a little alarmed. Had I… had I  _hallucinated_ that whole debacle? Did I just  _imagine_ the world shifting three degrees sideways and tilting diagonally backwards? No one  _else_ was reacting to what had happened, so I had to conclude with a sort of grim resignation that I was obviously losing my mind.

Or I was delirious with hunger. I hadn’t had a chance to drink my protein shake that morning, so maybe I just had low blood sugar or something.

Resolved to pretend nothing had happened, I took a step towards the door.

Abruptly, I was somewhere else entirely.

“Son of a  _butternut squash_ ,” I bit out, peeved and more than a little spooked. It was still a Walmart bathroom, that much I could tell. The layout, though, was all wrong. Horizonal instead of vertical. There were two more stalls than there had been a second ago, and the sinks were  _sinks_  and not automatic sensor nightmares.

The two women at the sinks turned to stare at me, probably impressed by my amazing grasp of the English language and my creative interpretation of profanity. They, at least, were the same.

Neither of them reacted to suddenly being moved four feet to the left, or that the whole room was abruptly, suddenly  _different_.

I hurried out the door without confronting them. Things were obviously very, very wrong. I stopped outside the bathroom door, a sense of vertigo washing over me. I wasn’t in the back of the store anymore, either. Now I was up front, overlooking the template-like format of the line of registers.

I could recognize some of the cashiers. Others were complete strangers who most definitely  _had not_ been there two minutes ago. I quickly looked down at myself. I still had my vest on. My nametag still had  _my_ name. I still had the tiny American flag pin on my right side.

Hysterically, my mind started running in circles like a hamster on a wheel.

_Was I still on the clock? Was my shift the same? Should I go back to register three? No, wait, there was someone already over there. Who_ was  _that?_

One of my managers was at the podium (which was in the wrong place), and I knew what I had to do. I was questioning reality. I wasn’t sure what store this was, or if I was in the same city. I was in no condition to be working. Taking the point for leaving early was  _worth it_.

She seemed sympathetic enough to my stammered statement that I was sick and had to leave. Of course, it’s not like she was invested enough in my life to question if I was being truthful or not. It wasn’t any skin off her back if one of her cashiers wanted to bug out for the day.

I wasted no time clocking out at the closest terminal (which was thankfully still in mostly the same place) and hurrying to the back where my stuff was. Used to be. Was hopefully still there.

Navigating the backroom was a nightmare and a half since nothing was the same, but the combination on my locker was so that, at least, hadn’t gone wrong. Someone I didn’t recognize passed by and greeted me by name. A generic, strangled-sounding ‘hey’ was enough to placate them as they walked down the hall.

Was I forgetting entire  _people_ now, in addition to losing my mind?

The parking lot presented an entirely new and exciting problem.

_Where was my car? Did I still drive a Volvo? Would my keys work?_

I dug through my purse. The key fob  _looked_ the same, at least. Nothing new had been added since the world had twisted itself like a pretzel, and I didn’t think anything was missing. If I was at least moderately still sane, I would be parked in the back near the—

—gas station that wasn’t there anymore. I stood near the entrance and stared out at the wide, empty expanse where the interstate should be. Where several small restaurants should be. Where  _the city of Alabaster should be._

I scrabbled for my phone. And stared. It wasn’t an iPhone anymore. It was a sleek, black thing, all angles and smooth curves roughly the size and shape it should have been (which might explain why I hadn’t noticed the difference before). At the top, in very conspicuous font, it proclaimed itself to be a  _Starkphone_.

What.

Ignoring that for now, I tried to find some sort of home button. Instead, it lit up at the slightest brush to its screen and acknowledged my name ( _Welcome back, Elizabeth_ ) and presented me with a row of icons I absolutely did not recognize at all.

I abruptly recalled that I was standing in the middle of a Walmart entrance, and scuttled out into the parking lot—thankfully devoid of a lot of cars—and spotted the silver Volvo which was (hopefully) mine. The key unlocked it, so I locked myself inside and set about figuring out how to open a map of some kind on my… Starkphone?

The icons were pretty self-explanatory. One of them was shaped like a smartphone, another like a text bubble, and a few were what I guessed were games. None of them looked like a map.

“I just need a freaking  _map_ ,” I complained to the phone, which made the screen flip sideways with absolutely no input from myself and what was obviously a map faded upwards into view. I stared at it. “Are you  _voice activated_?” I demanded of the phone, mostly rhetorically, before pressing at the map without waiting for a response.

I considered what the map was telling me in consternation. That wasn’t Alabaster. It wasn’t even Alabama. Gillette? Wasn’t that a kind of razor?

“Where do I live?” I tentatively asked the apparently voice-activated phone. I’d keep the questions easy, since phone AIs weren’t always that smart. The map moved on its own (down and to the right), and a blue icon popped up in a place called Sleepy Hollow. I most definitely  _did not_ live in a place called Sleepy Hollow. I would have avoided a place like that on sheer principle. “And where… where is Sleepy Hollow?”

The phone zoomed outwards (with no buffering time at all). Wyoming? What the holy living hell was I doing in  _Wyoming_? I’d never even been to Wyoming. Why would my psychotic break have put me  _there_?

Then the map dimmed and text started scrolling across the screen.

_User Elizabeth, your heartrate has increased by 34%. Do you require medical assistance?_

It only just occurred to me that I was hyperventilating and that, indeed, my heartrate had kicked it up a notch. More importantly though, the phone could apparently  _sense my heartbeat_ and was smart enough to ask if it should call 911.

“No,” I gasped aloud. “I’m fine, phone. Just give me a sec.”

The text faded away and the map came back into full visibility as the phone apparently accepted that at face value. I wondered half-hysterically if it had simply accepted my ‘no’ or if it had actually understood everything I had just told it.

Eventually I managed to wrestle my breathing back under control, my previous years dealing with anxiety attacks serving me in good stead. I took a shuddering breath and turned my attention back to the device which put the smart in smartphone, trying to figure out how to get back to the main screen when there weren’t any buttons. Swiping around just moved the map, and tapping just brought up information.

“Home screen? Please?” I asked the phone hesitantly, wondering if that was pushing it a little. Not even Siri was that smart. But my faith was rewarded when the map flicked away and the original screen revealed itself. “Contacts?” I asked it. A new screen unrolled (this time from the bottom up).

Half of the names I didn’t recognize. But none of them were important except the one that I couldn’t  _find_.

“Where’s my mom?” I asked the phone desperately, still scrolling rapidly through the surprisingly large number of contacts.

The list dimmed out as the phone responded to my query.

_No contact for “mom” is listed. Would you like to perform a search?_

I blinked wetly. I would have had her number in the phone if she’d been there.  _Dad_ was in there, but this was not the sort of conversation I could afford to have with him. “Yes,” I belatedly told the phone, giving it her name and the place I was pretty sure she still lived, even if I myself apparently jumped states.

_Searching…_

I watched raptly as the text didn’t change except for the typical movement of the ellipsis points that most machines used to indicate an active search.

_No results found, User Elizabeth. Would you like to widen parameters?_

“Yes, please,” I replied with no hesitation, gripping the phone tight enough that if I hadn’t been a scrawny thing with twigs for arms I might have worried about damaging it. “As wide as you can go.”

_Searching…_

I refrained from biting my nails. It was a habit I was trying to break, and even if this was a situation that warranted it I tried to stay firm.

_2,351 results found,_ the phone informed me briskly.

“Blond hair, around fifty years old,” I informed the phone, hoping it was smart enough to narrow down search options from my disjointed stammering.

_Narrowing parameters. 872 results found._

“Born in Alabama.”

_Narrowing parameters. 34 results found._

“Two sisters,” I told it desperately, groping for things to use that could narrow a search engine.

_Narrowing parameters. 3 results found._

“One daughter, two nephews,” I whispered hoarsely.

_Narrowing parameters. No results found. Refining search. 1 result found._

“Show me. Please,” I gasped at the phone.

The text flicked away and what looked like a google search engine opened up to a particular page. I prayed to God that it wouldn’t be a mortuary.

It wasn’t, but it wasn’t exactly good news either.

A woman who looked exactly like a younger version of my mother, with her maiden name and the names of her sisters, had apparently gone missing twenty-four years ago. There was no evidence of foul play, as she’d apparently vanished while walking between rooms in the house she’d shared with her husband (who did not share the name of my father). It was very,  _very_ suspicious that the day she’d disappeared was the day of my birth, to the  _year_.

My mind whirled with conspiracy theories. Maybe my mother was originally from  _this_ world, and she’d been teleported to  _my_ world on the day of my birth? But that was ridiculous. There were pictures, videos,  _evidence_ that she’d been born in my world and grown up there. Gotten married there. Given  _birth_ there.

So… she didn’t exist here, but she existed there? Had my presence here retroactively moved her backwards in time to another world? Thinking about it made my head hurt. I decided to accept that she was alive, but she wasn’t in a place I could feasibly contact her. I’d think of it like I was in a foreign country without access to the internet or phone service, despite holding evidence to the contrary in my hand.

Speaking of evidence.

“…thanks, phone,” I rasped to it. “For looking that up for me.”

_You are welcome, User Elizabeth. Do you require further assistance?_

“Yes actually. Call me Elizabeth, please. You don’t have to call me User all the time.”

As I was wondering if  _this_ was what would stretch the phone’s AI to the limit, the text responded without missing a beat.

_Very well, Elizabeth. Do you require further assistance?_

Whoever made these phones was a genius, I decided. “I… I’ll need help getting home. I don’t know the way.”

Without replying, the phone shifted back to the map screen and a route highlighted itself. When it started displaying directions in text, I realized a slight problem.

“I can’t read and drive at the same time,” I told the phone slightly confused. Was there a fix for that? Did it have a speech function like Siri?

_“My apologies, Elizabeth,”_ came a smooth, British voice from the speakers on my phone. I squeaked in slight alarm.  _“Will this simplify matters?”_

No it bloody well does not. My phone sounded like a  _human_ , not like a synthesized voice cobbled together by an actor reading a series of lines. If I didn’t know better, I’d think my phone had an actual person on the other end fielding all my questions.

“Thanks,” I squeaked out, putting the phone down in the cupholder as if it were a live grenade as I turned the car on. It groaned and snarled like it usually did, so at least the me in this reality had the same trouble with their brakes and engine as myself.

As I listened to my phone give very detailed directions (down to the foot of distance on turns) to where I apparently lived, I couldn’t help but be incredibly nervous about what I’d find there.

 

* * *

 

Dietrich Court was not what I had envisioned, at  _all_. At least three houses had RVs out front, and the buildings looked simultaneously like somewhere my grandparents would live as well as being  _drastically_ out of my price range.

“Are you sure this is the right place?” I asked my phone nervously. The house it had led me to had little in the way of personality out front, as well as a strange pale-yellow paint job that made me slightly nauseous just looking at it.

_“This is the address registered under your contact information,”_ the phone ruthlessly confirmed.  _“Do you require further assistance?”_

“That’s… that’s all for now. Thanks,” I told it.

_“Signing you off, Elizabeth.”_

And with that, the phone faded to black. I stared at it for a long, slow moment before I began shuffling through the car for an opener to the garage on the front of  _my house holy Christ._

I had a  _house_. How had I afforded a  _house_? On a cashier’s salary, no less?

The inside offered me no answers.

I had furniture, but only the bare bones of it. A couch, a desk, a few chairs here and there. The bed, at least, was the one I was familiar with from my apartment. There was a microwave in the kitchen, and a stovetop covered in dust. Some of my paintings and drawings from school were on the walls, like a sad attempt to give the rooms some personality. Some of them I didn’t recognize, but could see my handiwork in the way the lines curved, in the way I’d painted in blocks of color like a pop art impressionist. They were things I could have conceivably drawn or made, even though I had no memory of drawing or making them.

An investigation of the computer revealed that Windows was apparently still my OS of choice, even though the icons on my desktop were different. Photoshop was still there, so I might still be a graphic designer, but a lot of my games  _weren’t_  which was slightly more alarming. What kind of life did I lead with no Blizzard games? With no Sims?

My bank account information was apparently still the same, since I could log in with no problems, but the balance  _had_ to be a mistake. I’d never even seen a number that high, not in relation to myself. As the only one with all the answers, I pulled out my hyper-intelligent phone without pause and touched the screen to wake it back up.

“Do you have access to my bank account?” I asked it without preamble, somehow feeling confident that it would both comprehend my question and have a suitable answer.

_“Yes, Elizabeth,”_ it replied aloud, apparently still on the speech setting from the drive over.  _“Do you require help managing your portfolio?”_

It was adorable how the phone thought I had a portfolio, or knew what a portfolio even was. “I don’t think this balance is right,” I admitted frankly. “It’s… well it’s way too high.”

_“One moment.”_

I chewed my lip as I stared at the screen and its admittedly intimidating balance. I would have had to scrimp and save for  _decades_ , with no excess spending at all, to get even a fraction of the amount listed there.

_“I can find no irregularities in your accounts, Elizabeth. What seems to be the issue?”_

“Accounts? As in plural?” I sighed. “Wait, never mind. So you’re saying this number is accurate?”

_“As of seven minutes ago, this information was accurate, yes.”_

“Well, fudge.” I put my chin in my hand and considered this. I could  _live_ off the number listed there. For  _lifetimes_. Without working, even. “How’d it get that high?” I was mostly just asking myself aloud, but my phone apparently had an answer even to my rhetorical questions.

_“There is a large lump sum registered as a bequeathal entered into the account on the day of your birth. The bank associated with the bequeathal deposits a modest sum into your primary account on the first of each month.”_

What.  _What_. “A bequeathal? Whose?” I asked somewhat desperately. Who did I know that could have died and left a big enough fortune behind to be giving me  _monthly deposits_  over twenty years later? Also, apparently, this bank account had existed since I was  _born_ , and yet the log-in information remained the same?

_“The deposits are anonymous,”_ the phone admitted, sounding apologetic. I’d worry about my phone having emotions later.  _“I’m sorry to say I lack the processing power to determine their origin.”_

“That’s all right,” I replied absently, still only half-present mentally as I tried to wrap my mind around the funds apparently available to me. I had  _that_ in my bank and I was living in a house in Wyoming with IKEA furniture? I guess it wasn’t too far out of my expectations of myself that I’d live simple like this, but… but to not spend seemingly  _any_ of it? Not even on a paint job to cover up that awful yellow siding?

Why was I even working at Walmart if I had this available to me? Why not go freelance with my design work? Why not go back to college and finish my minor? Why stay in Wyoming, of all places?

Not that there’s anything  _wrong_ with Wyoming, I’m sure it’s a beautiful place, but… but whenever I thought about moving,  _Wyoming_ just never came up.

I was obviously dreaming. Or delirious. My mind was coming up with some sort of perfect fantasy world in which I worked for the sake of working, and where my bank account had more zeroes than I knew what to do with. But. But why would my delirium dream up a world without my mom in it?

I took a bracing breath and put the computer back to sleep, not wanting to stare at that ridiculous number anymore. If I had really, truly lost my mind… which reality was the real one?

My old reality, where I made exactly enough to make ends meet but had a best friend in the greatest mom in the universe? Or this one, where I apparently moonlight as a billionaire and spend my spare time working for the hell of it, but where my mom does not even exist?

I trudged into the bedroom (not  _my_ bedroom, not yet) and collapsed on the familiar bed with its unfamiliar surroundings. I let the phone stay on and set it on the nightstand, too mentally exhausted to worry about how to turn it off.

Maybe everything would make sense in the morning.


	2. Chapter 2

Things did not make sense in the morning. Disoriented at my alien surroundings, it took me several minutes of internal panic to remember what had happened the day before. I was still in bizarro-world where nothing made sense, and my phone was still turned on with the screen dim, but illuminated. Its battery level had not noticeably decreased overnight, which in itself just cemented how different this reality was.

“I’ve lost my mind,” I announced to the phone and to the world at large. “Absolutely bonkers.”

_“Would you like to schedule an appointment with a psychiatrist, Elizabeth?”_ came the almost cheeky, sarcastic response from the phone on my nightstand.

“No thank you,” I informed it as I crawled out of bed. I considered the question it had asked me and the implications behind it. What  _did_ I want to do? If I had really lost my mind, was there anything I could really do about it?

I didn’t  _feel_ crazy. But sane people don’t hallucinate the world breaking and reshaping around them. Sane people don’t dream up an entire parallel life, and then  _insert themselves there_. Maybe I was in a coma somewhere, dying? Maybe this was a really intense fever dream.

With a rush of adrenaline, I realized that if I  _really was_ in a coma living a drug-induced hallucinogenic dream life, I probably shouldn’t be spending it in this sad travesty of a house working at Walmart. Not when I had that monster hiding in my bank account.

“How would you like to go on a road trip?” I asked the phone as I snatched it up and stumbled into what I figured might be a closet.

_“A road trip, Elizabeth?”_ the phone sounded almost confused.  _“Where to, might I ask?”_

“Anywhere we want,” I decided firmly. The phone was practically a human as far as I was concerned. A human that couldn’t escape, I internally cackled to myself. “If I’ve lost my marbles, I might as well go looking for them somewhere more fun than Wyoming.”

_“I’ll just settle up your affairs then, shall I?”_ the phone said resignedly, seeming to almost sigh.

“Thanks phone,” I told it happily. I had no idea what it meant by that or what it was going to do, but the phone was the only thing I could talk to and so I trusted it by default. What was it going to do, plot against me?

_“I live to serve.”_

Ignoring that slightly sarcastic response, I found the familiar purple luggage set in the back of the closet and began shoving things into it. Some of the clothes didn’t look like something I’d be caught dead wearing, but the familiar comfortable things got stuffed into the bags. Worn-in jeans, soft T-shifts, a few jackets, and enough underthings and socks to clothe a small army.

A bit of searching found what I guessed was the power cord to my phone and a car adapter for it, so that went in my purse for ease of access. Recklessly, I packed like a whirlwind and was in the car in under an hour. I didn’t know enough about the house to know if I was leaving anything essential behind, but I’d confirmed with a bemused phone that the card I had was the one to the account with all the money in it so I figured I was set.

I took a few moments to fiddle with the stand velcro’d to the dashboard so the phone had one camera facing the windshield and the other facing me. I figured it’d be like a regular smartphone with a rear and front-facing camera, and if it was intelligent enough to have emotions maybe it could use the cameras like eyes?

It didn’t say anything about where I’d put it, and I didn’t enlighten it just in case I was being ridiculous and over-personifying a piece of technology.

“Let’s head to New York,” I decided spontaneously. “The scenic route if you please.”

The phone seemed to heave a sigh, but the map did fade into view and a blue route was plotted. 29 hours, huh? I tightened my grip on the steering wheel, determined to have a good time if it killed me.

“Thanks phone. You have any good mood music in there?”

Without a word, the phone started playing  _On The Road Again._ Cheeky little thing.

With a manic sort of smile, I backed out of the driveway and headed off towards adventure.

 

* * *

* * *

 

The phone was surprisingly good company. It was willing to hold long conversations about just about anything, and was very nonjudgmental about my supposed insanity. It constantly adjusted the route whenever I got distracted by an interesting-sounding city name or tourist trap without complaint. It was a better driving buddy than any of my friends or family, that was for sure.

At this point I was pretty sure the AI in this little phone was smart enough to qualify as a human being, which made its presence in a presumably mass-produced piece of technology more than a little baffling. I didn’t see or hear anyone  _else_ talking aloud to their phones (and quite a few people had the same model I did), which made me wonder if hyperintelligent AIs were so commonplace here that no one even utilized them.

Oh well. It was their loss.

In lieu of my decision to treat the phone like a person trapped inside a machine, I decided it needed a name. The phone demurred when I asked if it had one, which left it up to me to give it a name that wasn’t totally awful.

“I’ll call you Simon,” I decided, being totally stereotypical and naming the British-sounding voice  _Simon_. If Simon minded, he didn’t mention it.

_“As you wish, Elizabeth,”_ Simon said, sounding aggrieved.

Heh. Simon said.

As if he could hear my train of thought derailing, Simon sighed, loud and heartfelt.

 

* * *

* * *

 

I ran into the hitchhiker in Wisconsin. I almost didn’t even see him, since he was wearing black on the side of a road with no streetlights in the middle of the night, but my wonky headlights illuminated him enough so I at least didn’t hit him.

Pre-delusional Elizabeth would have kept driving, knowing better than to pull over for potentially-dangerous strangers on dark streets at night. Post-delusional Elizabeth was half convinced she was in a coma and therefore had nothing to worry about.

So I pulled over, despite Simon’s silent disapproval ringing louder than a death knell. I didn’t unlock the door, but I did roll down the window as I waited for him to pass me where I’d pulled over down the road a ways. When he appeared in the window, it took everything I had not to react.

He looked  _awful_. Covered in dirt and (was that dried blood?!) dust, his face was lined in fatigue even through the curtain of stringy hair hiding his features. He had on some kind of ski mask covering his nose and mouth, and was dressed in black leather under a hoody that was three sizes too big for his frame. The gloves, after everything else, hardly registered.

“Where you headed?” I asked as cheerfully as I could manage under the scrutiny of a pair of  _chillingly_ pale eyes. In the silence after this question, the Volvo hiccupped and thrummed under its own brakes and I pretended to hear nothing. Amazingly, the sound of my car being an idiot seemed to make him relax for some reason. I decided not to question it.

“New York,” came a rasping, hoarse voice with a thick Russian accent. I squealed internally. I  _loved_ accents.

“What an amazing coincidence,” I said loudly and to no one in particular. “So am I.” My coma theory was only getting stronger. What were the chances I’d run into a hitchhiker in a state I’d never been in, going to the same city I’d decided to visit on an adrenaline-fueled whim? “You want a ride?”

Simon was great and all, but he was still just a phone. I kind of needed some human interaction, even if this guy looked at me like he was afraid I’d go for his throat every time I opened my mouth.

_“Miss Elizabeth,”_ Simon started disapprovingly, making the hitchhiker jerk backwards as one hand vanished into the hoody’s pockets. He probably had a weapon in there, I acknowledged, but since he didn’t pull it or shoot me with it I figured it was probably ok.  _“I must protest—”_

“It’s cool, Simon,” I told the phone, aiming my attention towards it so the twitchy dude with the mask would know what had spoken. Cold blue eyes stared at the phone in its little stand  _very intensely_. From the way his posture had tensed and loosened up simultaneously, I thought he might be a veteran of some kind. That would account for the hyperparanoia and even, sadly enough, the state of his clothing and general self. “He just needs a lift, and I could honestly use someone to talk to who has a face.”

Simon fell silent, but I could practically sense the disapproval pouring off of him. I turned back to the guy at the window in victory, politely ignoring the hand still in his pocket.

“So, you want a ride? I promise I don’t bite.”

Hoody guy seemed to mull over this offer very seriously for a long moment before nodding once, jerkily. I unlocked the doors and watched him slide in, suddenly realizing how  _huge_ he was. He made my Volvo look like a tiny little smart car.

And—this was a very,  _very_ strange thing for me to be noticing—he smelled  _amazing._  Considering his general state of disheveled-ness I had expected him to smell kind of like a homeless person. Instead, he smelled like woodsmoke and gunpowder. Not the sort of combination I would have ever considered to be  _good smelling_  prior to this point, but now that I noticed it it was all I could think about. In short order, my little vanilla air freshener hanging from the mirror was completely overpowered and I was absolutely not complaining. I sincerely hoped this amazing smell stuck around longer than I suspected the man himself would, because  _damn._

It somewhat belatedly occurred to me that I had never actively smelled a person before, and that this might be further evidence that I had gone entirely mad. I resolved to enjoy the smell in silence and pretend to have noticed nothing.

Also (I noticed the second I pulled my head out of the gutter), he was staring at Simon suspiciously and looking tense enough to strain something.

Oh well, I thought as I pulled back onto the road and let Simon fix my course again. Company would be nice while it lasted at least.

 

* * *

 

So the hitchhiker has a metal arm.

He probably didn’t want me to know that, but it’s kind of hard to hide something like an entire limb made out of metal when you’re sharing a car for several hours. A headache throbbed behind my right eye as several previously unnoteworthy things started connecting in my head, like my phone being a  _Stark_ phone, and my masked hitchhiker who looks like every stereotype of a serial killer slash assassin combined having a  _metal arm_.

But this was a dream world, after all. It would make sense that the dream world was  _fictional_.

I didn’t have any really strong feelings about having innocently offered the Winter Soldier a lift to New York. He hadn’t horribly murdered me yet, and I sincerely doubt the Asset would have accepted a lift from a civilian. In light of this revelation, I was carefully not thinking about the reasons why my hitchhiker might smell like gunpowder, and also carefully not thinking about how much I resolutely  _did not care_ about those reasons in lieu of how good he still smelled. Nose blindness was, apparently, not going to be an issue here.

In retrospect, it also seemed to have been a terrible oversight to not have checked what year it was.

“Simon, what year is it?” I asked abruptly. The Winter Soldier tilted his head towards me as I spoke, face still hidden behind his mask (muzzle?) but muscles a bit looser now that he’d been here for a few hours and I’d yet to show myself as a Hydra plant.

_“It is currently December 20 th, 2015.”_

2015? I’d gone backwards in time two years? And if it was literally five days until Christmas, that would explain why it was so dang  _cold_ outside. Certainly a drastic change from the balmy summer I’d been in a week ago. More importantly though, I was pretty sure the events of  _Winter Soldier_ took place in 2014, and  _Civil War_  in 2016. So the Winter Soldier sharing a car with me wasn’t the Asset, but he wasn’t Bucky Barnes either.

Didn’t Ultron happen in 2015? Maybe New York wasn’t the smartest move ever, but this was  _my_ coma dream darn it.

“Thanks Simon,” I replied belatedly, still reeling over the timeline my scattered brain had presented me. I eyeballed the night sky outside and figured it might be a good time to find a place to stop for the night. “Gotta find a hotel,” I mumbled under my breath, aiming it more towards the Soldier than Simon. “Any preferences?”

“No cities,” came the rasping reply, cold blue eyes all but daring me to take him to a major hotel chain.

“Motel it is then!” I said cheerfully, entirely ignoring the silent threat I was being given. “This is so  _exciting_ , Simon. I wonder if I can find a really ratty deathtrap motel? Like the kind people get murdered in?”

Simon sighed, very audibly. Even the Soldier was giving me more side-eye than usual, which was really saying something since his attention rarely left me in the first place

_“Dare I ask why this excites you?”_

“Because I’ve never been to one before,” I replied easily, already scanning the horizon for signs. “Plus our guest here is built like a tank and speaks in a Russian accent. I figure the murderers will take one look at him and back off.”

I was being completely honest. Disregarding my dubiously intelligent decision to stop  _at all_ , the Soldier all but  _radiated_  potential violence. I had the feeling he could turn into a nightmare at the slightest hint of hostile action, which was why I had gone out of my way to be happy and cheerful the entire drive thus far and not question who he was or what he was doing.

Coma dream or not, I didn’t really want to get shanked in the kidney.

A very interesting expression crossed the Soldier’s face out of the corner of my eye just then, mostly hidden by his hair and his mask. But he didn’t exactly refute my statement, so I considered it a small win.

_“I should have guessed,”_ Simon replied, exasperated.  _“I’ll just find us a place then, shall I?”_

“Make it really decrepit and run-down,” I instructed, still feeling like this was something everyone should experience at least once. “Like, on the border of condemned.”

_“I’ll ensure there are extra rats and vermin, just for you.”_

“You’re a gem, Simon,” I told the phone sarcastically, secretly hoping he was joking. I wanted murderers, not roaches. On the off chance he was being serious, I tilted my head towards the Soldier so he’d know my next words were for him, whispering under my breath. “If there are roaches, I sincerely hope you’ll be a gentleman and take care of them for me.”

The Winter Soldier stared at the side of my head for a very long moment and didn’t reply. But maybe he’d get his act together when I scream aloud at the first sign of bugs and scare a year off his life.

A girl could dream.


	3. Chapter 3

The place Simon found wasn’t exactly a deathtrap, but it was definitely the kind of place shady drug deals happened under blinking streetlights. The rooms were dirt cheap, too, and I happily enough paid for the Soldier to have his own. No way was I risking him waking up after a nightmare and attacking me on reflex. I’d read too much fanfiction to think that would turn out well.

He gave me another strange look when I handed him his own room key. What, did he think I was going to force him to stay with me? If he was gone in the morning (which was likely) it wasn’t really my problem. I’d be sad, because the Winter Soldier was  _absolutely_ my favorite Marvel character and because he  _absolutely_ smelled delicious enough to tempt me to give premarital sex a try, but he was a grown man dealing with decades of torture and brainwashing and deserved to make his own choices about things.

Also, the very fact that I got to meet him at all was incredible and something I’d probably be thrilled about for a long time to come.

As I stood akimbo in my ratty motel room, I was pleased to not see any obvious signs of rats, despite Simon’s joking intentions.

“This is great,” I told Simon honestly enough. “Thanks, Simon.”

Simon sounded reluctantly fond when he finally replied.  _“I live to serve, Elizabeth.”_

 

* * *

 

The Winter Soldier was  _not_ gone in the morning, to my everlasting surprise. He had also ditched the leather armor at some point for some more discreet jeans and a long-sleeve shirt. The hoody was magically washed as well. I’d bet all the zeroes in my bank account that he still had an armory’s worth of weapons on his person, but he looked slightly less like a serial killer now.

The mask was also gone, and  _yep_ , that was the face of Sebastian Stan.

“Hey Simon,” I asked as I unlocked the car without commenting on the Soldier’s new duffle bag full of mystery items. “Does an actor named Sebastian Stan exist?”

_“One moment,”_ Simon replied dutifully, by now used to my strange off-the-cuff questions. The Soldier seemed nonplussed but put the bag in the floorboard of the back and got stiffly into the passenger seat.  _“No one by that name has played in any noteworthy films within the past decade.”_

“Thanks Simon.” So that meant the other ‘actors’ were really superheroes then. Without further ado, I backed out of the ratty motel and got back on the route Simon helpfully displayed for me.

_“Of course, mum.”_

Something about how he said that tickled my coma-brain, but I ignored it. It probably wasn’t important. Maybe a Codsworth reference from Fallout? Had that game been made yet?

“So did you sleep well?” I asked the Soldier absently, pretty sure the answer was a resounding  _no_ but feeling obligated to make small talk. “No rats in yours? I found a couple spiders, but nothing that made me need to come bother you for help.”

I was actually pretty proud of myself for taking care of those spiders. Killing them was one thing; it was picking up their tiny dead bodies afterwards that made me squicked out. But I absolutely  _would have_ gone and bothered the Soldier if there had been rats, ex-assassin of dubious sanity or no.

“No,” was the hoarse one-word reply I got in exchange. He could have meant that in a thousand different ways, but I chose to interpret it as  _no I did not sleep well, no there were not any rats_ , and  _no I would not have helped if you had come and asked._

“Aw, you would have helped,” I insisted with a grin, resisting the urge to elbow him in the (metal) arm as I drove. No need to tempt fate any more than I already was, just on the off chance this was actually happening and not a comatose fever dream. “I can tell that beneath the resting murder face you’re secretly a gentleman.”

“No,” the Soldier said again, that time with the faintest hint of amusement buried under the wariness and rough texture.

“It’s all right,” I allowed magnanimously, “your secret is safe with me. I won’t tell anyone that you’re really a rather nice guy under the gruff exterior.”

He didn’t say anything in reply to that, but his eyes crinkled a little at the corners even though the rest of his expression didn’t change. I counted that as a win.

 

* * *

 

“Simon,” I said calmly. Very calmly. “What am I looking at, here?”

_Here_  was the incredibly baffling—and somewhat disturbing—sight of two grown men growling and snarling at each other after one of them had bumped into the other by accident. I had left the Soldier in the car to keep an eye on the gas meter (and his Duffle Bag of Mystery) while I went in to scavenge up some snacks and sugar to keep myself awake on the drive.

I’d noticed the guy who bumped into the other guy when I walked in, because he was shaved bald and had facial tattoos—stereotypical and judgmental of me or not, I tended to keep an eye on those types—and had also (completely against my will) noticed he smelled kind of like formaldehyde.

That may have been a large part of the reason I’d given him such a wide berth.

Bald and Smelly had given me a once-over, visibly sniffed in my direction (was he on drugs, maybe?) sort of sneezed-snorted and then looked away. Drugs, definitely. And then he hadn’t been looking where he’d been going, and bumped into Short but Angry at the register who was apparently suffering from a very severe case of Chihuahua Syndrome.

Short but Angry was brown-haired and dressed in a suit that was probably meant to look a great deal more expensive than it actually was, and it looked absurdly comical when he whirled around, took one  _sniff_  of Bald and Smelly, and honest-to-God  _snarled like a dog_.

Bald and Smelly had bristled like an agitated rooster and growled back, sounding kind of like an angry hyena, and now both of them were posturing and snarling at each other while the terrified cashier huddled behind his counter and talked in a panicked voice to someone on the phone.

So I stood a bit behind them, utterly bemused, and consulted my Ticket to Knowledge.

_“It appears to be two alphas posturing for dominance,”_ came Simon’s entirely baffling and illogical reply.  _“I recommend retreating to a safe distance in the event their altercation becomes physical.”_

Obligingly, I took several large steps away from the scene. I had about a million and three questions about what Simon had just told me, but I knew this was definitely Not the Place to be asking them. Even I, with my literal outsider’s perspective, knew this was shaping up to be a very hostile interaction between two complete strangers who seemed to hate each other on sight.

Very slowly, as if I were sharing breathing space with two fighting dogs, I began edging towards the door. Snacks and a coke were  _not worth this_.

I’d only moved maybe three inches when Bald and Smelly whipped his head in my direction and  _barked_.

My joints all locked simultaneously—entirely against my will—as the sound of that ridiculous noise literally froze me to the spot. My thoughts raced. Did Bald and Smelly have some kind of noise-based superpower? Maybe they  _both_ did. Maybe ALL men in this weird world could control people using animal noises!

Apparently satisfied with my state of nonmovement, Bald and Smelly turned his attention back to Short but Angry who had—rather unwisely— _not_ capitalized on his opponent’s momentary distraction.

I was briefly considering screaming for help—the Soldier might come rescue me, he might not—when air moved to my right and suddenly my hitchhiker was just  _there_. He hadn’t even triggered the bell over the door.

He didn’t say a word, but something about the way he was standing, the way his shoulders were stiff and his posture was coiled like a stalking panther, made him seem about a thousand percent more dangerous than he ever had before. He smelled a lot more like gunpowder than he usually did, and it seems I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

Both Bald and Smelly and Short but Angry whipped their heads towards him as if he’d announced himself in some way despite being utterly, entirely silent. The Soldier didn’t so much as twitch a finger, but something shivered over his posture like the rising hackles on a wolf—something I  _felt_ more than  _saw_ —and both quarreling men immediately backstepped and  _cringed_ into themselves with an  _apologetic whine_.

A metal hand hidden by a glove hooked around my waist and bodily moved me towards the door as he stepped away, still not saying anything or changing expression from his usual resting murder-face, and neither of the men by the counter so much as lifted their heads to watch as the Soldier deftly maneuvered the both of us to the car without once removing his hand.

It was kind of good he didn’t, because I was still having problems getting my joints to unlock after being  _barked at for Pete’s sake_  and the Soldier seemed to know that somehow.

He got us both into the car and only when I was safely sitting down with the doors locked did he remove his hand, remaining silent but no longer emanating utter  _threat_. Slowly, the smell of gunpowder receded a little and the woodsmoke returned as if nothing strange had happened at all.

“Simon,” I said into the silence, proud of how even my voice was when all my head was filled with was hysterical screaming, “what the  _fuck_.”

Normally, I hated cursing. Normally, I wasn’t confronted with a scene straight out of an ABO fanfiction novel. God could forgive me  _just this once_.

Simon wasted little time in replying from where I still had him clutched in a death-grip in my right hand.  _“There are three secondary genders,”_ he began promptly, apparently sensing my utter lack of apparently crucial background information,  _“alphas, who make up approximately 10% of the population; betas, who make up approximately 85%; and omegas, who make up the remaining 5%. Statistically, most alphas are male and most omegas are female, although female alphas and male omegas_ do  _exist. Betas are rather evenly divided between sexes, although the population in America is slanted towards females.”_

I took a careful breath, keeping a stranglehold on the budding panic I could feel creeping at the edges of my vision. “And that little kerfuffle back there…?”

_“Alphas generally have little tolerance for each other outside of family members or close pack-bonds, and are highly aggressive in response to perceived wrongdoings. Generally alphas can control the urge to prove dominance over lesser rivals, but when startled or agitated fights do occasionally break out.”_

I considered this very, very carefully. I was less certain that I was having an elaborate coma dream, now; my brain  _couldn’t_ have dreamed up a world like this with such ironclad, set rules already in place. I had no frame of reference for it. So while part of me was freaking out over this apparently being  _real_ , the other part was circling desperately around the idea that I’d been dropped into an  _actual_ ABO world.

“What am I, then?” I asked, morbidly curious even as my voice sounded weak and reedy to my own ears. The Soldier, still remaining calm and motionless, cocked his head towards me at this question with an almost sarcastically-raised brow. It was the most emotion I’d gotten out of him yet, and I wasn’t even in the right mindset to appreciate it.

_“You are listed as an omega in your medical ID,”_ Simon offered helpfully, and I saw the screen move out of the corner of my eye as he apparently pulled up said medical ID.

I took a deep breath, mind snapping to the thick woodsmoke scent in the air that suddenly had an entirely new level to it. It was pretty obvious what ‘secondary gender’ the Soldier was—considering how he’d utterly schooled those two alphas(?) earlier with a single glance—which meant the reason I could smell him so well wasn’t because he just smelled good, but because I (as an  _omega_ ) had a super-nose. I wondered what I smelled like, but chickened out of asking.

“I need to know everything about what to expect as an omega,” I told Simon seriously. If I had just spontaneously become something  _other_  than a run-of-the-mill human, I needed to know  _everything_. I did not want to be blindsided by any of the myriad problems omegas tended to get heaped with in the fanfictions I would never admit to reading, like heats or mating cycles or  _anything_.

The Soldier actually turned his head all the way to face me at that, expression not really changing but somehow radiating an aura of perplexed confusion regardless.

_“Of course, Elizabeth,”_ Simon replied agreeably, sounding much calmer about this than I was.  _“Shall I cover the topics while you drive?”_

Abruptly, I recalled that I was still at a gas station with two cowed alphas in it, and that I should probably leave before something  _else_ went wrong. “Yeah. Sure. Let’s do that,” I said somewhat disjointedly. As I pulled out of the parking lot, I surely imagined the way the Soldier was taking deeper breaths than usual.

Yep. Definitely my imagination.


	4. Chapter 4

I sat on my motel bed, hands steepled and braced on my knees as I thought. Simon had been very informative about my new situation ( _orientation_ ), and had not once questioned me about why I didn’t already know all of this. One or two facts even seemed to be news to the  _Soldier_ , if his slightly wider eyes at a few things was any indication.

There were a few things about my new status as an omega that I found to be vastly more important than others.

The first was that, as an omega, I  _did_ have a heat cycle. Thankfully Simon had an app that was tracking mine, as the me of this world seemed to be using it kind of like I did for periods. And that was another thing: omegas didn’t  _have_ periods. They just had heat cycles once every three months whereupon they were fertile—apparently omegas were  _not_ fertile at any point other than their heat cycles, which understandably made sex a lot more common (I’d been blushing through that entire, dry description after my squeaked-out question) and pregnancy a lot less. Betas, on the other hand, functioned more like the regular humans I was used to, with a menstrual cycle and general permanent state of fertility. In fact, there wasn’t really anything different about betas from regular people except the ability to form pack-bonds and the instinctual knowledge to react to various sounds and postures.

The second thing that worried me about being an omega was the  _instincts_. In alphas and omegas, instinctual reactions and actions were far,  _far_  harder to control. I likened it to being a cross between a dog and a person, with the animal instincts handling social interactions and the human brain handling everything else. That was why when the alpha had barked at me—a command to stop moving, apparently—my body had reacted even while my mind was busy wondering about noise-based superpowers. Unmated omegas were vulnerable to that kind of thing from  _all_ alphas, while mated omegas only had to worry about that from  _their_ alpha.

And that brought up the third thing. Mates. Which were apparently a legitimate thing here. The most baffling of all—and, inversely, the thing that made me the most excited—was the existence of what the world commonly referred to as  _True Mates_ , but which functioned a lot like the mythical ‘soulmate’ trope from a lot of fiction. True Mates didn’t  _have_ to form a mating bond (a few stayed platonic, but not many), nor would they be magnetically drawn to mate with each other immediately upon making eye contact or anything, but they  _would_ be pulled to stay around each other and trust each other instinctually. The only way to really tell if someone was your True Mate was to actually mate with them; if you were, both of your eye colors would shift to match each other (generally as some metallic shade like copper or silver). If not, nothing would happen.

Now that I was mostly alone in my motel room with the Soldier safely ensconced in his own, I had felt it safe to ask Simon a few more  _probing_ questions. And hoo boy.

Omegas were, as a general rule, very tactile. This was pretty much par for the course for me even in my old world, but omegas kicked it up a notch by actually becoming literally depressed if they went without touch for too long. It could be with anybody—alpha, beta, or omega—but solitary confinement was actually illegal to use on omegas because it could get bad enough to constitute as  _torture_. Alphas were also tactile, but to a lesser degree than omegas. They would not accept touch from other alphas except from pack and family, and didn’t get much out of beta interactions. They wouldn’t go  _mad_ like omegas would if no one touched them, but it definitely set them into a more feral mindset that wasn’t really good for anyone involved.

Betas, the lucky bastards, didn’t have to worry about any of that.

Also, ruts were apparently a thing. Simon had explained in very dry, factual tones how alphas had ruts twice a year that lasted three days and were exceptionally fertile during those times. They didn’t ‘go feral’ or anything, but they were more tactile and docile around mates and less likely to start fights (except with other alphas, who would be attacked on sight). Alphas on rut were usually housebound, because it was dangerous for them to be out and about in case they killed a rival for a slight they would normally overlook altogether. And, yes, alphas  _did_ have knots, but only during ruts.

In converse, omegas during heats were  _aggressive_. They’d pick fights with anyone who wasn’t pack or family, even alphas (who usually smelled it on them and backed off rather than respond), and—for lack of a better term— _aggressively cuddle_ with any and all packmates or trusted alphas they could get their grubby paws on. Their sex drives shot through the roof, but  _only_ in regards to mates so they were generally safe enough to wander around in public if someone was there to keep them from picking fights. Unmated omegas usually stayed home or out of public places during heats, while mated ones could count on their alphas to curtail bad behavior and keep them in line.

I found it somewhat hilarious that the stereotype for ruts and heats seemed to be reversed here, with ruts being something to pity alphas for and heats being something to fear.

None of that helped with the fact that, according to Simon, I was due for a heat any day now. Now that I had been disabused of the fictional notion that my heat was some kind of signal flare for alphas looking for sex, I wasn’t quite as worried about it. I wouldn’t be bedridden, and depending how out of control I got could probably still drive us to New York.

I just wasn’t sure how the Soldier would react.

Hopefully I wouldn’t try and pick a fight with him, because that would be the absolute last thing I ever did.

 

* * *

 

I woke up in the morning feeling simultaneously like a pile of crap and like a shining beacon of energy. I wanted to stay in bed forever, and also wanted to get up and run laps around the motel parking lot. These conflicting signals resulted in a more moderate response of waking up normally and getting dressed, irritated with the way my previously-soft shirts felt like sandpaper on my skin.

Packing up made me irrationally angry when I misplaced a sock (under the bed), but I also found inexplicable joy in arranging my belongings in a Tetris-like manner to ensure everything fit properly.

It was as I was stepping outside (aggravated by the way my bra felt and giddy with the feeling that my hair looked amazing) that I realized this was like if all the emotional upheaval of my period were happening all at once.

Looks like my heat had started, then. Great.

I smelled the Soldier before I saw him—all woodsmoke with only a faint bite of gunpowder—and turned on my heel to face him. He was looking down at me somewhat bemusedly, visibly breathing deeper, and I wondered if he could smell the crazy on me. He probably could, because he tilted forward a bit as if he were going to get into my personal space before he caught himself and stepped back again.

Ignoring his body language and things like boundaries, I beamed at him—suddenly irrationally happy—and wrapped my arms around his muscled torso and squeezed him tight. Immediately, I felt  _amazing._  Touching him felt like being injected with liquid joy, and I only peripherally registered that he hadn’t tensed up or negatively reacted to me suddenly glomping him.

Instead, he shifted a hair closer and leaned subtly in. I wondered how long he’d gone without touch before my mind jumped tracks and realized we should probably get on the road soon.

“You ready to rage?” I asked the Soldier giddily, all but vibrating with a sudden surge of energy. I felt like I could run a marathon and then go on to bench-press several children. Without waiting for a reply, I squeezed the Soldier again and then let go, hurrying towards the car as if it would leave without us.

He smelled even more amazing in the enclosed space of the car, and I made no bones about letting him know it. Simon, from his place on the dashboard, seemed embarrassed  _for_  me. I couldn’t muster the energy to care about how inappropriate my comments were, too busy making sure the Soldier was perfectly aware that he smelled delicious.

For the rest of the drive until we stopped for lunch, there wasn’t a hint of gunpowder anywhere in the vehicle.

 

* * *

 

When the crash hit—approximately two minutes after I parked us in the parking lot of a small nondescript diner—it hit like a ton of bricks. I slumped against the Soldier, who obliged my liquid bones by wrapping the metal arm around my waist again to hold me up, and clutched at him with a very sad sounding whine.

I instinctively looked for the miserable puppy who had to have made that sound, before realizing it was probably me that did it.

“I’m a very sad puppy,” I informed the Soldier sorrowfully, as if I’d just told him that my entire family had died in a fire. The Soldier actually  _snorted_ above my head. “It’s not a laughing matter,” I reprimanded, still sounding sad and miserable. “I actually  _whined_.”

He didn’t reply, instead moving us towards the diner and easily carrying my dead weight like an Elizabeth-shaped ragdoll. Several eyes turned towards us—or, more specifically, me—when we entered, but the looming, massive shape of the Soldier seemed to deter them from commenting.

He sat us at a booth where I proceeded to shamelessly melt all over his side, clutching at his shoulders and making a general nuisance of myself. With the sort of stoic patience I imagine was burned into him over his seventy-year stint as an assassin, he bore my actions without so much as a twitch.

I didn’t really rouse from my dazed, lackadaisical haze until the waitress approached, smelling like hot asphalt and cinnamon and  _threat_.

I bolted upright in time to tune in to her blatantly flirtatious greeting to the Soldier (whose expression did not change) and my head snapped towards her on a frankly inhuman swivel. Immediately, I was  _incandescent_ with rage.

How  _dare_ this interloper try and poach my alpha from me?! I bared my teeth on a snarl and outright  _growled_ at the waitress, irrationally angry and ready to go for her throat at the slightest provocation. She froze like a startled hare, still leaning over to display cleavage to the Soldier who hadn’t even acknowledged her yet. Several nearby patrons turned to look at the scene I was making, but I didn’t even care. This… this  _trollop_ had dared to flirt with my Soldier?

A metal hand landed on the back of my neck and squeezed.

The fight drained out of me as if he’d pushed an off switch. My attention redirected towards the Soldier like a stop-motion glitch, and I melted back into his side, blatantly snuggling under the arm still wrapped around my neck and casting lazy glares at the waitress who—belatedly—I realized was a beta.

A waitress serving a table nearby (who smelled like oranges and something that felt like  _omega_ ) started laughing her ass off. “You asked for it, Nancy, poaching on the alpha of an omega in heat like that.” A few patrons nearby nodded their heads in sage agreement, eyeing ‘Nancy’ in disapproval.

‘Nancy’ grimaced, straightening up and taking a very obvious step back. “I’m so sorry,” she stammered, more to the Soldier than to me—which was probably smart, since if she’d talked to me I might have growled again. “I didn’t realize—”

“You nose-blind, honey?” an older gentleman one table over asked incredulously. “She ain’t bein’ exactly subtle.”

Nancy stammered a bit before flouncing away with a hurried excuse. The moment she was gone my hackles—which I hadn’t realized were raised—relaxed again. I frowned as rationality briefly returned.

So these were omega instincts in action, huh.

“I don’t like this,” I informed the Soldier matter-of-factly. The hand still on my neck squeezed again briefly (making my muscles feel like jelly) before he let me go. The arm stayed around my shoulders, though, which made what I was beginning to consider my inner-omega squeal like a fangirl.

The male beta server who returned to take our orders did nothing to step on my hair-trigger temper, thank goodness. He seemed very amused about it all and kept casting teasing glances at where Nancy was serving some tables on the other end of the room.

I kept one eye on her the entire time we were there—much to the obvious amusement of everyone else who noticed—and bared my teeth once when she got too close. The way she retreated to the sounds of the other patrons’ sniggering went a long way to calming me down again.

 

* * *

* * *

 

That night, I categorically refused to give the Soldier his own room. Or, to be more accurate, I bought us both rooms but then stubbornly followed the Soldier into his and curled into a sad ball on his bed. He more or less ignored me as he went about securing the room, checking for bugs or whatever, and then he laid down on the bed beside my ball-self without a single comment.

I rolled over and squirmed over him until I was plastered to his chest, trying to get as much skin contact as possible despite his still wearing jeans and a shirt and myself still in nightclothes. He tolerated this with enviable patience, not really moving to dislodge me when I elbowed him in the side or kneed him somewhere fragile on accident.

When I finally flumped down, happy with what I had accomplished, both his arms lifted up and rested lazily on my lower back as if whatever was making me act like a touch-starved psycho had also momentarily erased his paranoia.

Without thought, I lifted my head and rubbed the underside of my jaw all over his closest shoulder—which happened to be the metal one, ouch—like a cat staking a claim. This was, beyond a doubt, the weirdest bit of omega instincts to hit me yet. And I’d just spent an hour glaring death at a waitress.

My heart almost stopped when I felt his head dip down and his own jaw rub itself across the top of my head in return, that blasted inner-omega kicking up a storm by purring and generally being useless.

This meant something, I was sure of it, but it hadn’t been covered in Simon’s Guide to Being an Omega and my instincts (which I was trying to pay attention to) just seemed happy about it without any sort of qualifying remarks.

Oh well, I thought pessimistically. I’m sure it’ll come back and bite me later. I’ll figure it out then.

It was the best night’s sleep I’ve ever had.


	5. Chapter 5

I woke up with what I could only assume was a truly memorable hangover. Having never really gotten a taste for alcohol, I could only speculate that this huge migraine and ingrained ache in my bones was comparable.

“Is it over?” I croaked, half-delirious and half-hopeful. Simon, from where I’d dropped him the night before, spoke up in the general vicinity of the floor to my left.

_“Typical heat cycles for unmated omegas do generally last 24 hours, yes,”_ Simon confirmed.  _“Mated omegas, however, often have cycles upwards of three days.”_

The Soldier, currently wide awake and serving as a full-body pillow, tilted his head towards the sound of Simon’s voice but otherwise did not react. I waited for the embarrassment, the mortification, the shame of how I’d acted yesterday (and last  _night_! I’d  _used him like a bloody pillow_ ) to crop up. But it didn’t. I couldn’t work up any sort of emotional reaction to my previous behavior other than indifference.

I wondered if that was the inner-omega at work?  _It_ wouldn’t have found anything wrong with what I’d done, so maybe my rational self wouldn’t either? None of that really explained why the Soldier hadn’t rolled me off in the middle of the night, though. Even now, with me being ‘sober’ and aware again, he was still lounging on the bed like a lion at rest and not really reacting to my presence in his personal space.

Old Me would have been flipping out about sleeping literally on top of a man I’d just met. New Me, Omega Me, took one whiff of the solid woodsmoke scent in the air and found nothing to be concerned about. The Soldier wasn’t bothered, obviously, so why should I be?

I set aside these unsettling revelations as to my own mental state to unpack later, when I was no longer sprawled indecently overtop of the alpha I’d met all of two days ago.

Talk about moving fast.

It was as I was preparing to move—off, away,  _something_ —that I became aware that the Soldier still had both hands resting on my back. This was brought to my attention when metal fingertips—feeling sharper than usual—pressed in warningly, the plates on the arm I still hadn’t seen all of whirring and shifting under the sleeve of his shirt. I aborted my efforts to move and the unexpectedly sharp fingertips retracted again.

Okay. So it looks like I’m not going anywhere.

I took this moment of relative inaction to dig around in my feelings to try and ferret out what Omega Me was thinking. It wasn’t like I had a second brain or anything, or a voice in my head, but the instincts were so sharp, so  _dissonant_ from what I’d spent the past twenty-four years living with that they were very easy to differentiate from my ‘usual’ self. I was pretty sure someone who’d actually  _grown up_ as an omega would have a harder time doing this, because for them the instincts would be background noise rather than the air-raid siren they were for me.

_Alpha,_ purred my instincts. How unhelpful. I prodded at this thought, trying to make sense of it.  _My alpha_ , my instincts clarified.

All right. So Omega Me had, at some point, decided—without any input from me at all—that the Soldier was my alpha now. That seemed like the kind of thing that was a two-way street; surely Omega Me couldn’t just arbitrarily decide something like that without his input?

Almost in response, a snapshot of the night before when I’d gone all cat and rubbed my chin on his shoulder played out behind my eyelids. And then the unmistakable feeling of the Soldier’s jaw brushing over the top of my head in return.

Was that really all it took? A little jaw-brushing?

Or was this that ‘scent-marking’ thing Simon had briefly touched on before I’d gotten distracted by the idea of  _mating_ being an actual thing? If it was, that would make a lot more sense than Omega Me just  _declaring_ that it was so.

What did this mean for us now, I wondered. I’d—obviously—never had an alpha before. What was going to change? Would anything? I mean, apparently the touch-barrier was gone now (which was nice, I had to admit), but what else was different?

Simon had been pretty insistent that omegas with alphas and omegas  _mated_ to alphas were two entirely different things. One of them was a guardian type relationship, and the other was more of a partnership. Two guesses as to which was which, and the second doesn’t count. Omega-alpha pack bonds—like the one I was 99% sure we had initiated in my heat-haze the night before—often transformed into mate bonds  _later_ , but it wasn’t a sure thing.

What were my thoughts on that? I’d gone from a lonely but fulfilling life as a regular human to randomly being relocated to an ABO world in which nothing was the same and forming a magical pack bond (that hadn’t existed for me a week ago) with a fictional character that I’d known for two days.

I seriously thought about what my future was shaping up to be. Obviously, the Soldier was going to be sticking around. The pack bond would compel him to keep me close, if nothing else. Any ideas I had for a potential future now had to include the Soldier, and all the mess that comes with him. Like SHIELD and Steve Rogers and Hydra.

_Hydra_.

“Mother  _Russia_ ,” I bit out between clenched teeth, tensing all over. Beneath me, the Soldier flipped into high alert at the sound of my stress and—probably—the stress in my scent. He abruptly rolled, startling me slightly out of my fugue, until he had me caged underneath him with his metal arm planted between my head and the door, every muscle locked tight in alarm.

He was still dead-silent, but I could almost imagine lips peeled back over fangs that he most definitely didn’t have, claws flexing against an unseen threat.

I reached up and looped my arms around his shoulders and tugged him down—which he let me do; I wasn’t moving this guy anywhere against his will—trying to convey with body language and soothing noises that everything was fine and there wasn’t any danger. Eventually the tense line of his shoulders uncoiled and he settled down again, bracing most of his weight on his knees to keep from crushing me (thankfully) and sent me a very flat, unimpressed sort of deadpan stare.

“My bad,” I apologized sheepishly, to which he actually  _rolled his eyes_  before he shifted and stood from the bed, pacing around the room as I caught my breath from that little bit of excitement. “Simon,” I said abruptly, rolling and groping around the ground with my fingertips for my phone. “Tell me everything you know about Hydra.”

Metal fingers clamped around the back of my neck in a heartbeat, not tight enough to break vertebrae but most definitely a warning that he was willing and able to do so. Unlike last time, my bones did  _not_ turn into jelly. Instead, all the hair all over my body stood on end and ice crawled down my spine as I  _felt_ the razor-focus of his regard on the back of my head.

The air smelled of nothing but sharp, acrid gunpowder.

In retrospect, I probably could have been a bit more discreet about that particular line of questioning.

Simon, oblivious to the sudden tension in the room, answered my question from two inches to the right of my hand. Right next to a combat boot that I hadn’t noticed until I’d erred so spectacularly.

_“The organization known as Hydra is currently in the process of being dismantled by the Avengers, led by Captain Rogers. Public information puts the number of remaining Hydra strongholds as between two and six, located in Europe and Asia. All American Hydra branches have been located and destroyed, as indicated in the file dump released in 2014.”_

The fingers gripping the back of my neck slackened slightly, but I didn’t dare take that as a signal that I could move. I remained frozen belly-down on the bed, with the world’s most dangerous assassin crouched over my unmoving form.

“That’s a relief,” I told Simon as evenly as I could manage with a metal hand threatening to break my spine. “So we shouldn’t run into any in New York then?”

_“If any Hydra operatives remain in the United States, they will have larger problems than interrupting your impromptu road trip, Elizabeth,”_ Simon replied dryly.

Yes, like tracking down the Winter Soldier who’d just formed a pack bond with me.

I was thankful, however, that this meant that in  _this_ universe at least we probably wouldn’t have Hydra crawling out of the woodwork to reclaim their Asset. And with Steve Rogers (backed likely by Tony Stark’s money) actively hunting them down like rats the ones across the pond shouldn’t last too much longer either.

“Right,” I belatedly replied to Simon, mind still reeling with the implications of both Hydra’s non-presence in America and trying to find a way to convince the highly-suspicious assassin at my back to let me up. “Thanks, Simon.”

_“Of course, mum.”_

There was silence for a long, tense minute. I barely breathed, trying not to tense up under his hand and thinking calm thoughts. Incrementally the fingers slowly loosened their grip on my neck, still heavy and pressing me more or less face-first into the mattress but no longer threatening to snap my neck like a twig.

I didn’t hear any sign of movement—not the creak of leather or swish of cloth, or even a protesting bedspring from where one of his knees was braced by my hip—but suddenly there was breath on my ear that didn’t belong to me.

And then the Soldier rumbled.

It was a deep, bass thrum that vibrated through his chest and was felt more than heard. A quiet, intense noise that I wouldn’t have heard at all if he hadn’t been literally on top of me in an utterly silent room. Kissing-cousin to a growl, it was a threat and a chastisement and forgiveness all at once. Omega Me went boneless at the sound of it, relieved and repentant and very  _very_ sorry.

The hand on my neck lifted up and before I knew what I was doing, I felt myself roll over and latch onto him where he was still braced close above me, locking arms and legs around him as if he would vanish if I didn’t hold on tight enough.

My heart was racing like a jackrabbit. Adrenaline flowed belatedly through veins that lit up like fireworks, my previous hangover-like headache washed away in the flood of it. I became aware, slowly, that I was whimpering, incessantly, like a kicked puppy begging for a friendly touch. Objectively, I could rationalize that the pack-bond was new and therefore my newfound instincts were desperate to keep it. Emotionally, I was a train wreck made of other train wrecks, feelings colliding with each other and bouncing off each other like strobe lights.

The Soldier didn’t make any sort of sound in reply, but he did sit back on his heels and let me cling to him without pushing me off. That was, apparently, enough acceptance for Omega Me to calm the fudge down and stop flipping out.

Slowly, I felt him lean down and rub the underside of his jaw over my trembling head. A spike of woodsmoke broke through the cloud of gunpowder.

Resolve crystalized like diamond in my chest. I would keep this. I would keep this, and I—pacifistic, nonconfrontational Elizabeth—would rip the throats out of anyone who tried to take it from me.

 

* * *

* * *

* * *

 

They were an odd couple, Matt mused as he watched the alpha-omega pair wander into the store. The omega was a tiny little thing, maybe an inch or two over five feet, who barely came up to the collarbone of the massive alpha stalking after her like a bipedal shadow.

He’d been working here for years and in that time had seen all manner of packs wander through on their way to far-off destinations. He’d seen alpha-alpha packs (and whoa boy did he not want to think about the dynamics of  _those_ ), beta-beta packs, omega-omega packs, beta-alpha packs, all manner of triads, and—of course—alpha-omega pairs like this one. But none of them,  _none_ of them, had made him this nervous.

As a middle-aged beta, Matt generally slipped under the radar when alphas walked into the store. He was unthreatening, had a bit of a beer gut, and his balding head didn’t really inspire feelings of lust into any unmated omegas or other betas who might happen to be accompanying them.

The little omega had smiled easily enough at him when she came in, beelining for the candy aisle, but the alpha following her…

Matt felt like a rabbit staring at a wolf.

The alpha wasn’t posturing—not like some of the younger alphas who came by with little omega packmates—and he wasn’t baring teeth and outright threatening him. But the sheer  _presence_ of the man! The alpha stood tall and broad, shoulders square with a mantle of absolute  _authority_. This man wasn’t just an alpha. He was  _the_ alpha. The alpha of alphas, even.

Matt actually had to bite back the instinctual reaction to tip his head back and bare his throat in submission, and the alpha had yet to actually look at him. He had no idea how the little omega handled being the focus of that kind of attention, honestly.

She seemed entirely oblivious to the way the huge alpha had his focus arrowed in on her at all times, the way he  _breathed_ menace and the potential for violence, the way the loose cast of his body displayed his hair-trigger temper should anyone get too near.

Had that been  _Matt_ , he would have been afraid to  _breathe_ wrong.

But the little omega had no fear in her for the man. She reached out for him often, mostly absently—just little brushes of hands to the sleeve of his jacket, or to briefly curl small fingers around the muscled bicep that was probably as big as Matt’s head. And the alpha let her. He didn’t snap at her, or brush her off like some other alphas did when they wanted to be ‘macho.’ His expression was never  _friendly_ , but his body language expressed that she was welcome for anyone who looked closely enough.

Honestly, Matt wasn’t sure  _what_ their relationship was. They were obviously packmates, and they smelled enough like each other that they  _might_ have been mates as well, but the alpha also let the little omega tug him around and followed her lead—which alphas just don’t  _do_ with their omegas.

He carefully discarded such idle speculation as the omega and her alpha shadow approached the counter with a handful of bags and a bottle of cola. The alpha was watching him now, and those pale blue eyes were as cold as the arctic. Matt moved with robotic precision as he scanned the omega’s items and took her card, not daring to even  _contemplate_ making accidental skin contact with her. He had the feeling that’d be the last thing he ever did, counter or no.

He replied to the omega’s polite small talk on autopilot, his years of customer service serving him in good stead. When they were finally leaving, he briefly let out a sigh of relief.

The alpha tilted his head towards him at the practically inaudible noise, soundless footsteps never faltering, and Matt held his breath until the man was finally out the door.

He let his arms rest on the counter and let his head drop onto them.

He really needed a beer.


	6. Chapter 6

“So Simon,” I began during a lull in my one-sided conversation with my shiny new alpha, “what can you tell me about the Avengers?”

Color me curious, but I wondered how accurate the movies and the fanfiction had been about that eclectic group of weirdos.

_“Currently, the Avengers roster is listed as Captain America, Iron Man, Hawkeye, The Hulk, Black Widow, and Thor. Public files are available for viewing on each Avenger except for The Hulk. Speculation is that those files have been obscured by Iron Man in his capacity as Tony Stark for the protection of The Hulk’s civilian identity.”_

Aw, so the science bromance rages strong in this world. But… public files on Black Widow and Hawkeye? Weren’t they SHIELD agents? Wouldn’t having their civilian identities be public knowledge be sort of a bad thing?

Guess the outing of Hydra had kind of screwed them over a bit where that was concerned. The Black Widow was generally portrayed as some kind of master of disguise in fanfiction, so she was probably all right, but Hawkeye usually came across as some kind of goofy, clumsy, and hypercompetent master archer. I wonder how accurate that was.

“Thanks, Simon,” I replied absently, wondering if this version of Hawkeye was deaf. If so, that was a  _massive_ handicap for an assassin to overcome in order to be as good as he was. “Hey, are there any stores nearby where I can pick up some Christmas presents?”

It was only two days until this reality’s Christmas, and even though I had zero idea who my friends and family were (if they existed here, which I tried not to think about), I  _did_ have an alpha now that I should probably buy something for. With him being the world’s greatest assassin as well as following literally at my heels it would be impossible to get him something on the sly, but surely it was the thought that counted?

_“Take the next exit and turn left,”_ Simon said without really answering my question. Obligingly though, I followed his instructions. He’d yet to steer me wrong.

“Presents?” came the hoarse voice of my alpha, startling me slightly. He was the very definition of  _a man of few words_ , after all.

“Yeah,” I smiled, not taking my eyes off the road but knowing he’d see it. “I mean, it won’t really be a  _surprise_ , but you definitely deserve a present.”

He was very quiet after that, and I could see him watching me thoughtfully out of the corner of my eye.

He smelled like woodsmoke for the rest of the drive.

 

* * *

* * *

 

Christmas arrived swiftly, and I made sure we had a nicer-than-usual motel room for the occasion. We were maybe a day’s drive from New York now (thanks to my tendency to go wandering off at every interesting-sounding tourist trap and landmark, which both Simon and my alpha indulged without comment), and I was looking forward to playing the part of clueless tourist before I got bored and decided to go somewhere else. It’s not like I had to worry about running out of money.

The present I’d gotten for the Soldier was in a gift bag rather than wrapped, because wrapping a present on the road was  _extremely difficult_ , but I thought I did a pretty good job for picking it up on such short notice. I’d gotten him some fake metal bullets that you were supposed to freeze and use like ice-cubes that wouldn’t melt, presumably for whiskey. He wouldn’t have a use for them, but I thought he’d get a kick out of it.

I sat on the bed of our shared motel room (the Soldier had actually  _growled_ when I suggested bunking separately, which had literally had my knees give out as I face-planted spectacularly on the ground in shocked repentance), considering my contact list thoughtfully. In my old world, I’d usually sent out texts to family and close friends wishing them a happy holiday on all the major ones. In this world, I didn’t recognize a single name.

None of them had contacted me since I left Wyoming and, presumably, my entire life behind which gave me no clues as to who they were.

Except “Dad.” Who had no address listed, no email listed, no contact photo, and his phone number was  _literally_ the sunglasses emoji. I hadn’t thought it was possible to have an emoji as a phone number in a contact. Could I even send a text to an emoji? Simon had assured me the ‘number’ was accurate, which made me wonder if there was an actual number on file but I wasn’t allowed to see it for whatever reason.

Ignoring my reservations about trying to text an emoji, I quickly tapped out a message and tried not to think too hard about not having any texts at all on file for this ‘number.’

_Merry Christmas!_ I added a tree emoji and a present one for flavor, but kept it otherwise impersonal. It could have been sent by anyone who was even remotely connected to him, just in case this wasn’t actually my dad and he wouldn’t know who I was.

The reply came within seconds, far too fast for an actual person to have written it unless they’d literally had their phone open to the message app.  _Read 6:27 AM._ It actually said “Read 6:27 AM.” As in, that was the message. I blinked very slowly.

That was… vastly more sarcastic than I had been expecting. Especially from my father, who was generally a very serious person even over text. It only made me more suspicious that “Dad” might not actually be my literal father, or that I had a  _different_ father in this reality than my last one. Which made sense, since my mother had apparently jumped ship the second I was born.

“Simon, did the sunglasses emoji just sass me over text?” I asked blankly, still trying to comprehend why someone would reply to a Christmas greeting with a typed-out read receipt unless they were deliberately being a huge jerkhole.

Simon actually sounded embarrassed when he replied.  _“I… I believe so, Elizabeth. My most sincere apologies.”_

Why Simon was apologizing for the actions of some jerkhole with an emoji for a number I’d never understand. I considered deleting the contact altogether, but decided against it. For all that “Dad” was apparently a jerk in this reality, he was probably still related to me in some way and I really didn’t want to cut that thread unless I had to.

“Whatever,” I decided aloud, closing out the message app without fanfare. I didn’t have any emotional ties to whoever Dad was, and he obviously had no patience for Christmas greetings, so I just wouldn’t bother him.

I heard the bathroom door open behind me and turned with a smile, “Dad” forgotten. The Soldier was fully dressed (part of me lamented the potential loss of such a view), but his hair was still a little damp and the mirror behind him was visibly fogged over.

“Merry Christmas!” I all but shouted at my alpha, beaming in delight as I thrust the gift bag towards him. He paused, blinking once—his version of surprise, I guess—before he took the closest handle of the bag and stared at it.

I had actually been pretty sneaky getting this by him during my whirlwind crusade to find a present; he knew I’d bought  _something_ , but some judicious hiding of things in my shirt and some sneaky help from an amused beta cashier had hopefully kept its exact qualities a mystery.

“Merry Christmas,” he parroted back in his rough, still slightly-accented voice. He’d lost most of the accent over the past few days, which made me think he’d thickened it purposefully until he knew I wasn’t going to try and kill him.

And then, as if the surprise of receiving a greeting in return wasn’t enough, he actually reached into his Duffle Bag of Mystery and produced a box. An actual present, wrapped with a bow and everything. Where? What?  _When_ did he have the time to wrap an actual present?! He’d never been out of my line of sight for more than five minutes at a time!

As I studied the box he handed me in dumbfounded shock, I absently saw him pulling tissue paper out of the bag and pulling out the little box the fake bullets were in. He read the description written on the back lightning-quick, and the corner of his lips tilted up in a sideways sort of half-smirk. Even if he never opened the box, it had been worth it just to get some sort of amused reaction out of him for it.

My own present had a small sketchpad and some graphite pencils in it, which was a surprise—I’d never let on that I used to draw a lot—but that was touching all the same. I set the box down and wrapped him in a big hug (I’d never get over the fact that I had someone to actually  _hug_ ).

“Thank you,” I said into his chest. His flesh hand came up and squeezed the back of my neck in reply, which made my useless muscles turn to liquid. “Not fair,” I protested as I stubbornly clung to him with my functional limbs.

He just snorted over my head in reply, but that was all right.

This was turning out to be a great Christmas, and it had only just gotten started.


	7. Chapter 7

“I maybe didn’t think this through,” I admitted aloud as I tensed, white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel as I tried to navigate New York City traffic. There were one-way streets  _everywhere_ , kamikaze taxi drivers whipping out from around corners and bullying into the roads, and pedestrians blatantly jaywalking at every turn.

It was a nightmare, basically, especially after a life of relatively peaceful small-town traffic with lanes wider than a single car.

_“In two hundred feet, turn right,”_ came Simon’s unsympathetic, deadpan response to my panic.  _“Your destination will be on your left.”_  He was definitely mocking me now.

“You can drive next time,” I told the Soldier shakily as a white sedan all but materialized in my blind spot and muscled in front of me when I hit the brakes.

“Affirmative,” the Soldier replied stoically, his eyes tight with shared tension. My panic was doing nothing to calm him down, and the crowds of post-Christmas revelry going on wasn’t helping matters. The center console was already partially crushed by the literally iron grip he had on it.

“Where do I  _park_?” I wailed pathetically at Simon, seeing nothing but a solid line of cars for several blocks. “There’s no  _parking_! How does anyone in this city get anything  _done_!”

_“I hope you’re up for a bit of a walk,”_ Simon replied almost gleefully.  _“I’ve located an empty space four blocks from your destination. It will require you to parallel park.”_

I just vocalized wordlessly in misery even as I obediently followed all his directions to the letter. I hadn’t parallel parked in  _years_. This was just  _awful_.

Over the sound of my own wailing, I could hear my alpha laughing under his breath.

The traitor.

 

* * *

 

I shoved my key at the Soldier as soon as it was over, all but forcing it into his hand. He took it as if it were a live grenade.

“There,” I nearly snarled. Parallel parking had been hard enough on its own. Doing so in the middle of  _rush hour traffic in New York City_? I wanted to just start screaming and never stop. “Now it’s  _your_ problem.”

I stalked away down the street, following Simon’s laughing directions, and tried to ignore the smirk on my alpha’s face as he trailed me. I didn’t really succeed.

 

* * *

* * *

 

“New York pizza is weird,” I announced halfway through gnawing on the absolutely massive slice I’d been given. “Good, but weird.” It was actually pretty great, but I was still in a foul mood from having to parallel park earlier and this was as good an outlet as any.

The Soldier gave me a spectacular _Look_ from across the table, where he’d already put away five huge pieces before I’d finished half of mine. I got the impression that he was despairing at my intelligence, which was a not uncommon sensation lately.

“The crust is too thin,” I protested to the look on his face. The Soldier cocked an eyebrow at me disdainfully, letting me know in no uncertain terms that I was being an idiot and that I should just shut up and enjoy the pizza. “ _You_ shut up,” I grumbled into the pizza, ignoring my alpha’s smirk.

I kind of miss the days when he had all the facial expressions of a brick wall. He sassed me much less. The Soldier just shook his head and folded his last piece in half like a taco and ate it that way. Heathen.         

 

* * *

* * *

 

_‘Hey, I just met you~’_

I stopped and stared down at Simon as if he had sprouted wings and tried to take flight. The Soldier came to a halt at my side and raised a brow at me, as if it were  _my_ fault someone was calling me and had that particular ringtone. Well, actually, I guess it might be my actual fault if other-me had been the one to assign ringtones, but surely we had enough in common to have more sense than that?

_‘~and this is crazy~’_

I lifted the phone to eye level and stared at it. The sunglasses emoji smirked back.

_‘~but I’m your daddy~’_

My eyelid ticked.

_‘~so answer maybe?~’_

Full of irritation, morbid curiosity, and slight resentment over my rebuffed Christmas wish, I swiped to answer the call and lifted it to my ear.

_“So I maybe did kind of a bad thing,”_ the male voice on the other end said immediately, not even bothering to pretend with trivial things like greetings or polite conversation.

Well, this was one question answered. That was  _not_ my dad’s voice. I began to have a very bad feeling about why I might have someone in my phone under an emoji who wants to be called ‘daddy.’ Was… was other-me into some…  _kinky_ stuff?

“Oh?” I replied calmly. I wouldn’t give ‘daddy’ an inch until I knew exactly what kind of weirdo relationship other-me had with him. “Was it when you sassed me over a Christmas greeting, or when you called me out of nowhere and didn’t even say hello first?”

There was a slight pause.  _“Both?”_ the voice asked, trailing up at the end questioningly.  _“Both,”_ he reasserted more firmly a second later.

The Soldier was frowning at Simon where he was pressed to my ear, and I belatedly realized he could probably hear both sides of this conversation, what with his super-hearing. Hopefully ‘daddy’ kept it PG.

_“I was… busy when you texted and I might have, sorta, answered on auto-pilot?”_

“Auto-pilot,” I parroted dubiously.

_“I was busy! You know, kind of have an important job to do? Saving the world? Ending world hunger? Ringing any bells?”_

It was obvious this relationship wouldn’t last very long if this was the sort of commitment ‘daddy’ could offer me. No wonder other-me didn’t have any texts on file for him. “All right. Next time? Why don’t you just not answer, instead, and text me back when you’re  _not_ busy. Sound good, ‘daddy’?”

_“…It’s the ringtone, isn’t it?”_ the man replied, sounding amused and chagrined.  _“Too much?”_

“Too much,” I agreed placidly, aware of the Soldier looming out of the corner of my eye. So ‘daddy’ had been responsible for that patchwork abomination of a ringtone, then? Somehow I wasn’t surprised. “Have a Happy New Year,” I said firmly before hanging up. No point in giving him a chance to sass me over yet another holiday, after all.

I silenced Simon regretfully (hopefully he’d still be able to talk) and put him in my purse so I could refocus on what we had been doing before ‘daddy’ called.

“I sincerely hope he’s my biological father and not a failed attempt at a kinky relationship,” I admitted in low tones to the Soldier with a frown. The Soldier frowned back and a low, displeased rumble built in his chest. Automatically I stepped into his side and let him wrap the metal arm around my waist, still frowning.

I suppose if anyone understood not being sure who someone was, it would be my alpha. I smiled as I let myself snuggle into his side as we walked, ‘daddy’ forgotten. He wasn’t nearly important enough to worry about.


	8. Chapter 8

I awoke to a shortness of breath and the smell of marshmallows. The cause of the former was identified easily enough: I currently had 250lbs of super assassin (and at least 50lbs of _metal arm_ ) sleeping atop me and quite literally crushing me into the mattress.

I wheezed for breath. _Quietly_. He was asleep, after all, and startling him awake might be very hazardous to my health. I considered the popcorn ceiling of our latest hotel room as my alpha breathed steadily into my neck—and I was _in no way whatsoever_ jealous of that. No sirree.

Romance novels and various movies had led me to believe that this situation was a sweet one. An intimate one, even. Nowhere in any book or movie I’d ever read or watched did anyone warn me that this could also be a potentially _lethal_ one.

If I didn’t wake him up, I’d probably pass out from air loss and die quietly in the night. If I _did_ , he might react on instinct and snap my neck or plant a knife in my liver or something. I took another strained breath and shifted slightly in a search for more breathing room. A metal arm wound tighter around my waist in response and further constricted my breathing. Seeing as I had just made _negative_ progress towards my goal, I switched tactics.

If I could just…! I squirmed like a worm on a hook, managing to free one leg and hook it over something for leverage and pressed up with my hips, seeking _air_.

Something was pressing back.

What…? What was—

The Soldier exhaled a heavy, throaty rumble into my neck, tightening his grip on my _everything_ as his entire body rolled in a sinuous arch that pressed an unmistakable sign of arousal directly between my legs.

I froze, one leg still hooked over my alpha’s hip and mind blue-screening at the knowledge that the Winter Soldier had just—unintentionally or not—dry humped me in his sleep.

 _Oh. OH!_ I mentally flailed, running in circles screaming hysterically. What do I _do_! What do you _do_ in this situation? Do I… do I ignore it? It’ll go away on its own, right? Do I. Do I try to wake him up? Surely, _surely_ , I should wake him up. Do I… do I _participate?_

I blinked very slowly at the ceiling, paralyzed with indecision and a good heaping of horrified fascination. I’d been using him as a body pillow for almost a week now, and never had… _this_ … sort of problem (ahem) _arise_. What was different about _this_ time? Was it because it was the other way around? He must have rolled in his sleep (I certainly hadn’t been suicidal enough to _start out_ with my lungs being crushed) and just… not woken up?

But the Soldier wakes up if I _breathe_ at him funny. Why was he still asleep? Oh God was he _sick_? Was something _wrong_?!

I should wake him up. I should have woken him up five minutes ago when I first realized I couldn’t breathe right. Hindsight was 20/20, I guess.

I tried to pull an arm free to nudge at his shoulder, and was rewarded by a low snarl and all of his limbs clamping down like a vice. I froze again and found myself tipping my head back and biting back a whine. Okay. So _that_ wasn’t happening. Of all the times for omega instincts to kick in—!

“Hey,” I whisper-hissed under my breath, more of a suggestion of noise than an actual word. It was kind of hard to talk when I had to struggle for breath. “ _Hey_.”

The Soldier could have been carved out of granite. He weighed as much, at least.

I took another careful breath, feeling slightly woozy now. I could still smell marshmallows. Where were those marshmallows coming from? _I_ certainly hadn’t bought any, and the Soldier never left my side as if he’d been surgically attached there at the hip.

“ _Simon!_ ” I hissed, even now unable to get over my psychological disability to talk loudly around a sleeping person. Even with my life literally on the line. “ _Help_.”

From somewhere to my right, on a nightstand, a rooster crowed. Loudly.

I would be having a Talk with Simon about what constituted _helping_.

The Soldier opened his eyes, and every muscle in my body locked down. There was something… _off_ about those eyes. They were very focused, intense in a way I wasn’t used to seeing, and yet at the same time they weren’t really _looking_ at anything. His pupils were pinpricks in the dark room. He was still compressing my lungs to a disastrous degree.

“ _Air_ ,” I wheezed at him. Focused-yet-unfocused eyes snapped to stare at my face like a stop-motion glitch. I sucked in another stuttering, struggling breath, and could see the exact moment clarity returned.

Pinprick pupils expanded dramatically, almost blotting out all color, and he all but jackknifed off the bed and off of my chest. The breath I took then, deep and full, was almost obscene in how pleasurable it was. I sucked in too much too quickly though, and started coughing almost immediately.

An auspicious start to my day, to be sure.

A hand gripped the back of my neck and hauled me up unexpectedly off the bed, pressing me face-first into his chest (not going to lie, it was a very nice chest) as he inhaled deeply and held it for several counts before exhaling.

“Breathe with me,” he ordered roughly, voice like gravel. One hand settled on the back of my head and the other wrapped around my waist to splay fingers across my chest. My breath stuttered again at suddenly having metal fingers all but plastered between my breasts. Good _Lord_. He shook me slightly, like a dog trying to get my attention. “ _Breathe with me._ ” That time it came out like a command, low and deep and _alpha_ and my omega hindbrain highjacked my lungs and _obeyed_.

I followed his breathing, inhaling when he did and exhaling when he did, and struggled to not freak out at the unexpected, innocent groping. _Not the time to be having a crisis about my virginal status!_ Eventually, after about a thousand years, my heartbeat slowed from its rabbit-like quickness and I stopped stuttering on each breath. When my tense muscles finally unwound, the Soldier likewise unfolded and I realized how incredibly stiff he’d been holding himself.

“You… are very heavy,” I said finally into the semi-awkward silence. The Soldier let me pull my head away from his chest and his eyes were still widely dilated, but focused on the here and now in a way they hadn’t been before.

Then I took another deep breath and realized where the strange smell was coming from. I frowned. The Soldier mimicked me.

“Why do you smell like marshmallows?”

 

* * *

 

“What do you mean _he’s in rut_?” I hissed at Simon vehemently from where I was currently hiding in the small hotel bathroom. “Why does rut _smell like marshmallows_? Give me the answers, Simon!”

 _“Well,”_ came Simon’s placid, unruffled reply, _“rut-scent tends to smell differently to various people. Alphas cannot smell their own ruts just as omegas cannot smell their own heats. It’s entirely possible your alpha doesn’t even_ know _he’s in rut to begin with.”_

“Explain yourself,” I hissed, aggravated. I was still reeling from earlier and unable to erase the phantom sensation of having an incredibly handsome man’s _parts_ pressing against me in a _very intimate place_. That was more action than I’d ever gotten in my entire life, and one party hadn’t even been properly conscious for it.

_“The symptoms of rut from an alpha’s end are not very noticeable without the presence of a mated partner. Increased tactility, heightened senses, a more docile temperament towards packmates... nothing that would stand out as ‘out of the ordinary’ for the regular alpha.”_

But my alpha wasn’t a ‘regular alpha,’ was he? Almost as if he’d read my mind, Simon continued.

 _“If the files I’ve found on him are correct,”_ Simon hedged, _“then it’s likely your alpha has not been on rut for almost seventy years.”_

I took a careful breath. Even here, through a solid door, I could smell marshmallows and burning wood. It was patently unfair how delicious I found that combination. That there were files out there detailing exactly how much Hydra had screwed him over was… well it wasn’t a good feeling.

“Anyone can read those?”

_“They were heavily encrypted, mum. It would take a computer with quite a bit of upper-end access to break through them, or someone with a very high-level of technological expertise.”_

Well that was one thing at least. “What does that mean for him?” _For us?_ Because I wasn’t leaving the Soldier alone for this, definitely not. He hadn’t abandoned _me_ when my heat had turned me into a psycho cuddlebug, so it was only fair to return the favor.

 _“Who can say?”_ was Simon’s unhelpful response. _“It could last days, or weeks, or a_ month _. His rut might be stronger than usual, or weaker. He might demonstrate unusual characteristics or develop strange habits. The only way to be sure is to let it run its course.”_

“So I should probably stop hiding in the bathroom, then,” I sighed. It wasn’t that I was afraid of my alpha, or of his rut, but I was _anxious_ about it. Ruts didn’t make alphas into feral beasts anymore than heats did omegas, but… but it was one thing to know objectively that the alpha that I had more than a little bit of a crush on was currently _in rut_ , and another thing entirely to experience it firsthand.

 _“That might be best, yes,”_ Simon agreed, deadpan as anything.

I locked the phone almost mutinously in reply.

 

* * *

* * *

* * *

 

He had frightened the Principal. The Soldier was… not pleased with this development. He sat on the bed the Principal allowed him to share with her and studied the closed door leading to the washroom.

He was used to his handlers being wary of him. He’d gone as far as to purposefully edit his behavior in order to make them _more_ wary of him at times; such a small rebellion was not worth the expense of burning it out with the Chair, and had been one of the only ways he could effectively act out without punishment.

But the Principal. He did not want the Principal to be afraid of him like his handlers had been. The Principal was… _nice_. The Principal _liked_ the Soldier. He could smell it on her—a total, complete lack of guile or ulterior motives that was almost… refreshing. It certainly had been a large part of why he’d allowed the Principal to appropriate him that day on the road. His handlers had always smelled like aggression, like anger and fire and _pain_.

The Principal smelled crisp, clean, like vanilla and fresh linen and _life_.

He had frightened the Principal. Had harmed her with the weapon that was his body without her _or his_ consent. It did not matter that he had not meant to do so. It barely even mattered that he’d been unconscious at the time. His handlers had taught him better than that. Sleep? He could hardly believe he’d dared to lower his guard enough to _sleep_ in the first place.

He did not growl like he wanted to, nor did he allow the tension coiling in his mind to reflect upon his body or face. Instinctual reactions like that had been one of the first things his handlers had burned out of him all those years and lifetimes ago.

The door to the washroom opened and the Principal peered out from behind a curtain of thick hair. He had carefully not listened to her conversation with the Simon Device. It was not his right to overhear what she obviously had not wanted him to know.

The Principal tiptoed over to him and flopped beside him on the bed. Some infinitesimal fragment of tension lifted from his shoulders at her easy acceptance of his nearness. Perhaps he had not so thoroughly erred that she would see fit to decommission him or set him aside.

One thing he did _not_ fear from the Principal was punishment.

“So Simon says you’re in rut,” the Principal announced. The Soldier focused on her face to better understand the tone she had used. It was not like her usual voice. She seemed strained, anxious, but also slightly amused? Something she had said amused her while also making her upset.

“Rut,” the Soldier repeated obediently. He knew what a rut was, in theory. He had often taken advantage of the heightened aggression a rut brings alphas to lower their guard or incite challenges. A challenged opponent in rut was more careless with their body and easier to catch unawares.

It had somehow not occurred to him that he, as an alpha, may also fall victim to a rut.

Simply another in a long line of things his previous handlers had erased from him for so many years. The Soldier tilted his head and almost absently scented the air again. The Principal still smelled like vanilla and linen, tinged with the lingering traces of honey that had fogged his thoughts and narrowed his senses a few days previous.

 _Heat_ , the Soldier thought. Omegas went into heat, like alphas went into rut. The Principal was an omega, he knew this. It was what had allowed him to reciprocate when she had initiated the pack bond— _he could still hardly believe the Principal was willing to equalize them in such a way, to give the Soldier_ authority _over her—_ but if he were truly in rut, was it safe for her to be around him?

He had seen alphas succumbing to rut being extraordinarily violent, occasionally and _especially_ towards omegas. Perhaps those had been isolated incidents. One incident was one too many.

“Safe?” the Soldier queried. The Principal encouraged questions with body language and scent. She had thus far disdained to reprimand the Soldier for speaking out of turn.

“For me?” the Principal clarified, to which the Soldier nodded. “Oh, sure. Simon says—” another flash of amusement, “—that ruts don’t really make alphas _feral_ or anything.” That was inaccurate, but it was not the Soldier’s place to correct the Principal. Merely to listen. “I should be fine. You’ll probably just be more touchy-feely than usual.”

The Soldier recalled the visions playing behind his eyes before the Simon Device had woken him and alerted him to the traitorous actions of his body. _Touchy-feely_ she called it. Accurate.

Perhaps that would explain the burning in his muscles, the way his entire body ached with the need to wrap around her and shield her from the world. He resisted, of course, because he had more discipline than that, but if this was what most alphas went through he could understand why some became violent.

The Soldier considered. Was the _rut_ also why he felt compelled to place the hand of the Arm on the Principal’s back and shove her face-first into the mattress? Was the _rut_ why he wanted to sink his teeth into the back of her neck and establish his claim on her so thoroughly that other alphas would smell him on her from miles away?

Somehow he doubted it. But it would be an acceptable excuse from which to base his resistance to such thoughts and feelings. It would be beyond improper for him to take advantage of his Principal in such a way when she did not possess a mating-scent or a Draw towards him.

Instinct, at this point, was really all he had left. And instinct dictated that until and unless she smelled like she wanted such things, he was not to lay a finger on her.

“We should probably stay in today,” the Principal was saying, bringing him out of his thoughts. He agreed. Restraining his behavior around the Principal was simple enough, but he doubted it would be as easy if he were to be confronted with a challenging alpha. “I wonder what they’re playing on TV?”

As the Principal set about trying to decipher the controls for the television, the Soldier contented himself with leaning subtly closer and breathing deep. Vanilla and linen. Still as sharp and crisp as the first day he’d met her, leaning out of a car and laughingly inviting him to join her.

The Principal was, in many ways, more lost in this century and this world than he was. She was very… _ignorant_ about many things. Things even he, with his piecemeal memories, had managed to figure out through simple trial and error. To not even know her own orientation? The Soldier bit back a growl at the thought of what had to have been done to her to erase her identity _that_ thoroughly. Even Hydra, with all its technology and its tortures, hadn’t been able to do likewise to him.

She did not behave like someone who had been erased like he had been. But what else could it be? Massive swaths of her life were missing entirely. He could read it in the way she stuttered over stories of her past—facts and dates and events not lining up quite right—and in the way she had nothing and no one tying her down to a life outside of their current travels. She was a woman with nowhere to be, no one looking for her, and nothing to do.

He highly doubted anyone had even noticed she was gone.

She reacted to him unlike any other omega he’d met. She did not fall to her knees at the first hit of his presence, did not coyly attempt to seduce him or sway him to her desires. She did not buffet him with pheromones or entice him to take liberties with her person. But… neither did she shy away from his touch, from the baring of his teeth or the narrowing of his eyes. She did not fear him. Not like all omegas—and most everyone else—instinctually did.

She _had_ instincts. She used them, mostly obeyed them where they cropped up, but they were… _alien_ in a way that was not natural for humans. She could choose to listen to them—mostly—and picked and chose the ones that suited her best. When caught off guard alpha commands still overrode her conscious thought, but…

 _But_.

The Soldier heard himself rumbling in displeasure. The Principal idly reached back and took his flesh arm, wrapping it around her side as if seeking to give him comfort.

Something had been done to his Principal. To his omega. Something had fractured her, broke her mind until she did not remember what it meant to be _human_. He was not the best person to teach her how to be such. In fact, he doubted there existed a person _worse_ than he to instruct someone else on how to be human.

The Principal did not question him. She did not pry into his past or his history. She had not even asked him for his _name_ in all the time they’d been traveling together, seeming to instinctually default to calling him ‘Soldier’ in the few times she’d spoken a name for him aloud, and ‘alpha’ otherwise. It was not a _large_ leap of the imagination that she could have inferred his profession by his demeanor and what he’d been wearing when they met.

Suspicion lingered. If she had not smelled so _innocent_ that day she’d told her Simon Device to speak of Hydra, so _concerned_ that she’d offended him…

“Ooh, they’re playing _Jaws_ ,” the Principal was murmuring to herself as she painstakingly went through every channel, apparently unable to decipher the remote adequately.

The Soldier slowly lowered his chin to rest atop her head and let his attention shift outward, keeping watch. There was no logic to pondering on what might have been. The Principal was here. Was his. _His_ omega. He would uncover what had been done to her mind, _who_ had broken her, eventually. And when that day came, well.

It was good that the Principal was distracted by the movie on the screen, because his grin—hidden in her hair—was full of teeth.


	9. Chapter 9

The Soldier was exercising.

Wait, I need to rephrase that. The Soldier was currently redefining the word _exercise_ into something Chuck Norris would be envious of. I sat on the bed blatantly staring, enraptured, at the impossibility happening on the floor of this little New York hotel room.

He had been doing pushups for three hours straight. Before that I’d left to go get some food and he’d been doing things with his body that made my muscles quiver in horrified sympathy. But that wasn’t even the greatest part, oh no.

It was the way he was currently doing those pushups for three hours straight _on only his right index finger._

It just. That wasn’t _possible_ , was it? Even for a supersoldier? Was this comic-book physics coming into play? If it had been the left arm it would have been a bit more believable, but _this_? I was about ready to throw in the towel and proclaim this entire reality pure madness.

“There was a neat flyer in the lobby downstairs,” I heard myself saying. “Promoting stronger pack bonds or something.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off the way his muscles were moving. He hadn’t even broken a sweat yet. Pale eyes flicked to stare at me as I spoke, but he did not stop performing impossible pushups and did not falter. His eyes were still widely dilated, which Simon had assured me was a symptom of rut and not an indicator that he was going to keel over dead at any moment.

Without taking my eyes off him—this was _doing things_ to me, all right?—I pulled the aforementioned flyer out of my jacket pocket. All things considered, it really _was_ an interesting little advertisement.

It’d been pinned to a corkboard in the lobby downstairs alongside a few others, and from what I could understand from the incredibly vague, circumspect terminology it _seemed_ to be a workshop to strengthen pack bonds. It claimed to be able to teach packmates how to better mesh with one another and become more ‘in tune’ with their instincts.

Honestly, we probably didn’t _need_ a stronger pack bond. But.

_But._

I still wasn’t really… 100% on board with my ‘omega’ instincts. They were just… weird, frankly. I had no way to know if the things I was thinking and feeling were actually _me_ , or if they were just my shiny new omega brain trying to translate alien sensations into emotions I was actually capable of understanding. This workshop thing would probably have lots of other omegas in it. Omegas that knew what they were doing, that had _been omegas_ for a lot longer than a week and were able to actually _act instinctually_ instead of freezing up and overthinking everything they thought and felt.

Maybe watching how they acted and reacted to things would help teach me what I was _supposed_ to be doing, so I could at least blend in better? Because, at this point, I was pretty sure even the _Soldier_ was cottoning on to how new to this I was and he _had_ to be getting suspicious.

Grown women in this world just didn’t act like I did. They didn’t _not know_ that they were omegas, or that secondary genders were actually a thing. They didn’t ruthlessly interrogate a phone’s AI for information on heats that they most certainly should have been having for at least a decade by that point.

“We should go,” I heard myself saying again. “It might be fun.”

My alpha pushed himself upright onto his knees and stared at me, raising a single brow. He was breathing heavily, but not—I thought—from actual exertion. He still smelled like burning wood and marshmallows and _galloping galumphagus_ it should be illegal to smell that good. I could practically _feel_ my entire body lock up in order to prevent myself from just oozing off the bed into a puddle of melted Elizabeth and wrapping around his closest limb like an octopus.

Was this because he was still on rut? I mean, I’d always sort of had the vague urge to lick him all over and hold onto him like a huge teddy bear, but I was generally able to ignore that sort of thing as being _entirely inappropriate_ thank you. Not so much anymore.

“Safe?” the Soldier rasped, dragging me back out of my thoughts. He still had a brow raised and he still smelled like marshmallows.

“Oh, right,” I cottoned on, feeling like my head was stuffed with wool. The whole rut thing. “You’ll probably be fine. I mean, you seem to have a pretty good handle on things.” A very interesting expression crossed his face right then, but I barreled on without letting him interrupt. “It’s… more for me than for _us_ really,” I admitted. “I’m sure you noticed, but I’m kind of… _new_ to the whole ‘omega thing.’ This would be a good place to get some insider info, you know? Watch some other omegas in action.”

The brow lowered, and his breathing eased out a little. “Collecting intel,” the Soldier nodded curtly. “Understood.”

“Great!” I beamed at him as I hopped off the bed, suddenly full of energy. “It doesn’t start until tomorrow, so we’ve got some time to kill. What do you wanna do? I mean… other than insane amounts of pushups?”

Without replying, the Soldier slid smoothly to his feet and bustled me back onto the bed where he proceeded to clamp all his limbs around me like a steel trap. A nose buried itself in my neck as I felt more than heard a deep rumble pick up in his chest.

“Oh,” I announced intelligently to the ceiling. “I love cuddles,” my traitorous mouth blurted without my consent. The lips pressed to my throat curled up in a tiny smile. My heart did something strange at the feeling, and I briefly wondered if I was about to pass out.

“Yes,” the Soldier acknowledged, his voice low and like gravel. I resolutely _did not_ swoon. No swooning here, nope.

“Was that a ‘yes, I also love cuddles’? Or a ‘yes, you do indeed love cuddles, it is in fact glaringly obvious’?” I wondered while I did not swoon.

“Sleep,” the Soldier ordered. He still smelled delicious and sounded sinful.

“I can’t really sleep on command there big guy—”

“ _Sleep_ ,” my alpha commanded.

I was out like a light.

 

* * *

 

I sat awkwardly near the back of the room, trying to avoid eye-contact with the half a dozen or so other omegas who had zeroed in on us the second we walked through the door. The Soldier had bared his teeth at them the first time they eyed him, so now _I_ was the one getting stared at for having brought a rutting alpha to a ‘pack bond strengthening’ workshop. So maybe that had been a bit of a faux pas, but I needed information more than I cared about social niceties.

As we waited for the instructor to arrive, I tried to surreptitiously eye up the crowd. My nose wasn’t the greatest, but I _thought_ I could pick out about six omegas, four alphas, and maybe ten betas. A pretty big turnout for something advertised on a hotel corkboard.

What was really interesting though was the way everyone had _sat_. Two of the maybe-omegas were sitting together with several seats between them and everyone else, and I was pretty sure one of the packs here actually consisted of an omega and two betas. I tried to rationalize how _that_ was meant to work out, because to me betas smelled pretty… neutral, really. I hadn’t interacted with any in any sort of depth, but they just didn’t have the same bite to them that my alpha did.

But that might have been because my alpha was also the Winter Soldier, and out of the four maybe-alphas I was smelling only one of them looked to be in any sort of impressive shape.

“Hey,” a voice said under their breath from somewhere to my right. I turned my head in surprise and found a young man sitting two seats away from me, leaning across the distance between us as he spoke. He looked anxious, and kept flicking nervous glances between my alpha and the overweight maybe-alpha sitting grumpily on his right. “Is he, you know, going to be _okay_?”

It took me a second to make the connection. “He’s fine,” I assured the nervous man. I tried to be discreet with the way I inhaled curiously, and got a surprisingly suppressed whiff of oranges and cinnamon along with a sense of _omega_. I’d been under the impression that male omegas were _super_ rare. What were the odds? I elbowed the Soldier to pull his attention from where he’d been staring down a small cluster of twitchy-looking maybe-betas. Dilated pale eyes fixed on me immediately. “You doing all right?”

“Yes,” the Soldier replied, still sounding rough and slightly raspy but less like overwhelming sin. The Soldier looked up and made split-second eye contact with the male omega on my right before the other guy cringed back with a quiet whine and dropped his eyes entirely. The Soldier ignored this and looked back at me. “I am functional.”

“Let me know if you need to leave,” I insisted, feeling kind of guilty that I’d dragged him out of the room when he probably didn’t want to do anything but snuggle until his rut was over. The Soldier’s dilated eyes softened slightly and his flesh hand lifted up to squeeze the back of my neck. I melted immediately, gripping onto his shirt and the chair to stop from simply dripping into a puddle on the floor. “Not fair,” I grumped as I struggled to claw my way back to a sitting position.

The other omega had a blush on his face as he watched us out of the corner of his eye, looking scandalized. I was sort of confused about that, because we weren’t really _doing_ anything, but whatever. Maybe it’s some social taboo I was ignorant of and the Soldier just didn’t _care_ about.

Now that I thought about it, though, there was a distinct _lack_ of touching going on in this room. I frowned, trying to be subtle about how I was eyeing up the various tiny packs scattered about. In fact, _no one_ other than the Soldier and I were in any sort of physical contact with one another. Most of the omegas looked twitchy, eyeing up the various alphas around the room, and the betas’ faces could have been carved out of stone. The alphas, on the other hand, looked mostly bored and as if they’d rather be doing anything else.

Almost defiantly, I pulled the Soldier’s flesh arm into my personal space and wrapped my arms around it. I was beginning to suspect that maybe this was less a ‘pack bond’ workshop and more of a ‘marriage counselling’ sort of situation.

Awkward.

“Thank you all for coming,” a voice broke in from the front of the room. My eyes redirected in that direction, surprised to see one of the maybe-betas from the front row had taken his place at the podium. “I know it’s difficult to ask for help, but this is the first step towards really opening yourself to the pack bond. I’m very proud of all of you.” The beta smiled, clasping his hands and looking like he was two seconds away from cooing at all of us.

I tried to make my face look less like I had just cottoned on, and more like I knew exactly what I was doing here and why. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the Soldier’s face pull into a wry sort of amusement as he glanced down at me. Figures even _the Soldier_ would have known what was going on before I did.

“Now, I want everyone to partner up with someone of an opposing orientation, please! I have a few exercises I think will really get us started!”

I clutched tighter to the Soldier’s arm when a few people looked in our direction, as if they wanted to partner with one of us. I almost bared my teeth at them, but managed to bite back _that_ particular instinct in time for my face to only twitch negatively in displeasure. It was enough for the omegas to wince away and the betas to look for easier targets. None of the alphas had looked in our direction since we’d gotten here, probably able to smell the rut on the Soldier and not willing to risk it.

I took a steadying breath, letting the marshmallow scent drown out the conflicting signals of a dozen strangers. This was what I’d come here for. I locked eyes on the closest omega (and the uneasy looking beta who’d been grabbed unceremoniously to partner with her) and set in to take some _notes_.

 

* * *

 

I stared at the… the thing the cheerful beta presenter had handed me. Around me, I saw my fellow omegas holding back coos of delight. One or two of them had even tried to hide it in their shirts and the male from earlier actually _hissed_ when his partner (the overweight alpha who’d been next to him) made a motion to reach out towards it.

I looked back down. It was _supposed_ to be a baby, I guessed. It looked like an infant, like one of those plastic dolls that were way too lifelike to be any fun for anyone remotely sane, but it was… it was _wrong_. I couldn’t even put my finger on why it was so distasteful to me, but my face had been curled into an actual _sneer_ ever since it’d been put in my hands. I hadn’t sneered at anything in my _entire_ _life_.

It was plastic, that much was obvious. It smelled like plastic, too, which was sort of off-putting even if there was a faint undertone of something _else_ that was _almost_ like talcum powder but… artificial, somehow. The face didn’t move (yet; I’d felt a switch on its back under the onesie and was terrified it was going to make _noises_ ), but it had those mobile eyelids that probably blinked like some of the newer doll models did.

Frankly, it was making my skin crawl just holding it. The Soldier was tense as a bowstring at my shoulder, eyes fixed on the thing I was holding. My anxiety was probably feeding his tension, but I couldn’t make myself calm down. This was way more stressful than it had any right to be. It was just a toy. Why was it _bothering me so frigging much_?!

“All right,” the cheerful beta announced, holding his own doll. “The Nurturer Instinct is one of the basest omega instincts in existence. Omegas in defense of offspring have been known to fight off entire packs of alphas and betas before, so don’t let anyone make you think you can’t protect yourself or your packmates. Now, I’m sure you noticed there’s a switch on the back of your dolls. Flipping it will, obviously, turn it on.” The beta smiled self-depreciatingly. I barely noticed, too busy mentally recoiling in horror. “These dolls have been programmed to be as realistic as possible, so don’t be alarmed if you feel compelled to behave around them differently than you normally would. They’re designed to trigger a response, so let them do their work. We can learn a great deal about how you function in your pack from how you react to the dolls. Whenever you’re ready!”

No one moved. Some of the omegas were still cuddling the deactivated dolls, and the male omega was still hissing at his irritated alpha partner. Then, one of the betas a few groups away who’d partnered with an omega who’d refused to even look at the doll, turned his on.

The reaction was immediate. The omega nearest to him (the one who wouldn’t look at the doll) whipped her head around with a whine and actually _snatched_ the doll from the beta, clutching it to her chest and whining, high and reedy. I couldn’t hear what the doll was doing, but the omega was running her jaw over its head and whining like a puppy.

Encouraged, others began turning their dolls on, and I could almost _see_ the stress level in the anxious omegas start decreasing as they focused on the activated dolls. The betas seemed bemused but willing to go along with it, and the alphas just looked relieved that the omegas had stopped looking so nervous.

I took a deep breath and reached around to flip the switch on my doll.

It _moved_. I froze in sick horror as the doll’s head moved and it blinked up, pouting mouth motionless even as a _noise_ emerged from it. My head was full of static, but I recognized the soft whimpering mewls as something that registered as _infant_. Its arms and legs were fully mobile, and it was making noises that—I guessed—were designed to provoke the ‘Nurturer Instinct’ the beta had been on about.

I felt like I was going to vomit.

Conflicting signals were going off like fireworks in my head. My _ears_ were hearing a distressed pup. My _eyes_ were seeing a creepy nightmare doll. My _nose_ smelled _plastic_ and _steel_ and _lies_. The doll’s ‘skin’ was slick and smooth. The cloth was rough and scratchy. My brain couldn’t rationalize what I was doing. What I was holding. I wanted to throw the doll across the room. I wanted to hold it close and protect it, but also couldn’t imagine touching it any more than I had to because it was horrible and wrong and—

_—artifice! Threat! False! **Not a pup!**_

I _snarled_. The sound was loud, low, rolling like thunder. It was nothing like a sound any human being should ever be able to make. All sound cut out immediately, all eyes swinging to me, but I barely noticed through the haze of absolute _rage_ coursing through me. This thing was _anathema._ It was a _false pup_ , a _pretender_.

To my left, a deep growl echoed me. The sharp, acrid smell of gunpowder filled the room as the Soldier reacted to my aggression with prejudice. I swiveled towards him, legitimately _throwing_ the doll away from me, and a metal arm caught it in midair. I didn’t have much time to process that before the Soldier’s arm _twisted_ with a metallic whine and broke the doll in half. Metal fragments and sparking wires caught the light as the noise the doll had been making stuttered into something scratchy and blatantly artificial, before the Soldier dropped both halves of the _false pup_ with a low rumble.

The room was quiet except for my intermittent snarls as I stared at the corpse of the doll, still sparking occasionally, and the low, threatening rumble from the Soldier as he loomed at my side.

Somewhere, behind the cloud of rage and hostility, I had enough cognizance left for a single semi-coherent thought.

_Well, shit._

 

* * *

 

“I think we should talk about what happened,” the beta said kindly as he sat the Soldier and I in a private room. One of his helpers had taken over the rest of the workshop while the beta approached us cautiously and gently herded me (and, by association, the Soldier) out of the area.

“I went psycho on a doll, that’s what happened,” I told him bluntly. I didn’t feel _bad_ about it, really, except maybe the dolls were expensive and he was going to ask me to replace it. That wouldn’t be a hardship. It wasn’t like I was strapped for funds anymore.

“It’s not really that rare a reaction,” the beta assured me, still smiling kindly. “It’s not even the most extreme one I’ve seen this _year_. All it means is that your instincts are vastly stronger than the average omega, so much so that they weren’t fooled by a simulation.”

I had exactly enough time to start relaxing slightly as I realized I hadn’t irrevocably outed myself as an _alien_ , when the beta’s face shifted into something much more serious. I froze.

“However, it’s also an indicator of… past trauma, so to say. I won’t make you talk about it, but if you ever need somewhere safe to stay…” his eyes flicked meaningfully towards the still-tense form of the Soldier, and I stared blankly back for several long seconds before the wires crossed and I _got it_.

“ _Oh_!” I all but shouted, making the beta jump and the noises from the room outside go quiet. “No! I’m fine! Everything’s great! No trauma here! Just weirdo instincts!”

Yeah, that sounded real. No _way_ was this beta going to think I was just panicking and covering up some kind of sketchy background of abuse.

“Nonetheless,” the beta persisted, unflappable in the face of my mania. He pressed a card across the table without directly handing it to me, looking as at ease as if he’d just met us on the street. I shoved it in my pocket without looking at it, mortified and almost stiff with the need to not look at what the Soldier might be doing with his face. “Do you feel comfortable rejoining the class? The section on the Nurturer Instinct should be over by now.”

Did I? I hadn’t ever really been _un_ comfortable in the first place, but rationally I knew I probably _should have been_. Feeling nothing at all was probably not a very good sign, not if my weirdo reactions were indicators of frigging _abuse_. It made me wonder, though. I knew _I_ didn’t have any such thing in my history, but…

But what if this version of me _did_? I already knew my life and the life of the me in this reality, Omega Me, were different. Did _this_ version of me have _that_ sort of thing lurking in their nightmares? Had jumping ship to this reality earned me a get-out-of-jail-free card regarding lingering trauma?

Maybe that was why my instincts were so weird. Maybe the residual effects of… of some kind of _abuse_ had warped the way Omega Me reacted to things?

Great.

“Yeah, sure,” I belatedly replied, trying to ignore the implications of my body reacting to things I simply _didn’t remember_. The beta smiled kindly at me—he’d mostly been treating the Soldier like a piece of bristly furniture—and stood to lead us back out into the main room.

No one looked up to watch my ignoble retreat to the back of the room, but I could feel their attention on us regardless. Excellent. Just what I needed to cap off a wonderful day.

I barely listened as the beta took command of the class again, going on about some kind of ‘interaction therapy’ where people switched around with members of different packs, too busy trying to untangle this newest problem.

“The body remembers what your mind forgets,” I whispered under my breath, reeling with the implications. How was I supposed to deal with this kind of thing if I simply didn’t remember living through any of it?

A metal hand slid up my back to comb through my hair, and the Soldier tilted closer with a quiet rumble. “Yes,” he acknowledged, eyes heavy with things I knew would have broken the mind of literally anyone else.

I took a steadying breath and leaned into the absentminded caress. I could worry about this later, when we weren’t in such a hugely public setting. For now, I let my attention drift back towards the beta up at the front of the room and let myself enjoy the hand in my hair. I normally didn’t like anyone touching my head, but for my alpha, I would make an exception.


	10. Chapter 10

“So I’m Bill,” the nervous beta introduced himself, fidgeting anxiously under the stare of the Soldier. My alpha had pinned the boy with his eyes the second he’d sat at our little table, urged over by the well-meaning but ultimately-interfering beta counselor running the show. Technically we were _supposed_ to be shuffling around and switching up pack members. Also technically, you would have to—quite literally—pry me away from the Soldier with the jaws of life.

Luckily no one in the room was suicidal enough to try asking _him_ to leave _me_ , not while he was still in full rut, so we’d been able to stick together at this little table.

“Elizabeth,” I introduced myself, trying to sound polite and welcoming and not at all like I wanted to drop kick this guy away from us at the nearest conceivable opportunity. “And this is—” My mind skittered over options because _Bucky Barnes_ and _the Soldier_ were both equally awful choices to use for an introduction to a random civilian, before settling on “—James,” without too much of an awkward pause.

The Soldier’s intense stare on the beta ratcheted up several notches in lieu of a response to his new (old) name. The kid (because he had to be under twenty) sunk down slightly in his chair, wide eyes never leaving the Soldier.

“Nice to meet you,” he squeaked, shoulders migrating up somewhere around his ears.

As he began stammering out something to the effect of his favorite color or something (reading off the cue cards the counselor had passed out), I took this moment to study the first beta I really interacted with that didn’t specialize in picking out odd behavior.

He was… really boring, actually. He wasn’t hideous or anything, but nothing at all about him was even remotely appealing. That was a little surprising, since Old Me had been able to find at least one attractive thing about most people with a little effort, even if it was something throw-away like nice eyes or a sharp jawline. He also smelled really bland, like stale air or the inside of a grocery store. Background scent, basically. I wondered if all betas were basically just background characters, or if Bill here was special.

 The little timer up front dinged, and Bill all but launched himself out of the chair as if someone had just thrown a grenade at him. I hadn’t even heard a single one of his facts about himself, and wondered if he’d legitimately spent the whole ten minutes stuttering in the face of the Soldier’s unblinking stare.

Someone pulled out the seat and replaced him, but I was barely even paying attention at this point. None of the omegas were going to be approaching the table, that much I knew on instinct. Not with the Soldier on rut, and smelling like he did. I figured _they_ probably weren’t smelling delicious marshmallows, but whatever it smelled like to _them_ had most of them bone-white at the very _thought_ of approaching us.

“Tyson,” a low voice purred from across the table, accompanied by a hand held out to shake.

I stared at the outstretched hand, dragged out of my thoughts. That was something I’d noticed early on. _No one_ shook hands. At least, not that I’d seen in person. What was this guy playing at? I looked up, acknowledging his existence for the first time, and felt something that distantly felt like shock.

Because that was one of the maybe-alphas. A quick inhale proved that, yes, he _was_ an alpha. He also smelled like wet leather, cat pee, and gasoline. I scrunched up my face on reflex, just barely resisting the urge to actually cover my nose entirely. Even I knew that was probably extremely rude.

Obviously, I did not reach out and take his hand.

“…Jane,” I lied, smiling blandly and feeling my skin crawl just by the way this guy was looking at me. What a skeever. “This is my alpha. You can call him Sergeant.”

The Soldier peeled his lips back in a grin that was mostly teeth. His canines seemed sharper than they should have been, and his eyes were just a thin ring of icy blue around dilated pupils. If ever the term ‘eyes like a shark’ had applied to a human being, it was now. Holy cheesecakes, he looked like he was going to go for this dude’s jugular at any second.

Looking somewhat put-out that I’d rebuffed him, ‘Tyson’ retracted the hand with a smarmy sort of grin. Geeze, I hadn’t known guys like this actually existed in real life. I mean, surely he wasn’t a total idiot? Surely he’d caught the way I’d introduced the Soldier as _my alpha_ , and also caught the way I was all but sending up flares to signal my unease?

“So,” Tyson began, leaning over the table and bracing his elbows on the surface. He, he actually _flexed_. Was I dreaming? “What’s your favorite color?” He somehow managed to make this innocuous question sound salacious, which would have been impressive if I hadn’t been mentally chanting _abort abort abort_ since he’d opened his mouth.

“Pink,” I lied curtly, not about to give this guy an inch.

“Cute,” Tyson had the gall to _wink_ at me. At my side, I heard the Soldier’s arm click through a recalibration sequence. Wow. This guy really _was_ an idiot. “Mine’s green,” he grinned, blatantly trying to hold and maintain eye contact.

I considered my options, here. I was barely a novice in Omega Etiquette, but all my animal knowledge said eye contact was a _challenge_. That’s why that male omega had dropped his gaze when my alpha had looked at him. As an omega, I was expected to defer to this guy. I was expected to submit to the greater will of this random alpha, because I was unmated and therefore lower than him on the social totem pole.

I lifted my head up entirely and locked eyes with him. Tyson’s expression tightened, then turned ugly. He was trying to maintain the grin, but it twisted into a sort of sneer-like grimace as I held his eyes and did not back down. I didn’t even feel an urge to, like I’d been expecting to. I mean, if those alphas in the gas station could send me to my knees with a bark, I’d been sort of expecting eye contact to be similarly magical.

Then Tyson started growling, low and intermittent like it was mostly involuntary, and his muscles were tensing. God, this was pathetic. I wasn’t the least bit intimidated by this guy, or his sad attempt to cow me into obedience. I didn’t feel any sort of urge to growl back, or assert my _own_ dominance, but for all the effect this guy was having he might as well have been a toddler throwing a tantrum. Somebody _else’s_ toddler, at that.

Visibly angered by my refusal to back down, Tyson stood sharply from the table, growl amping up into an outright snarl as he tried to assert his dominance.

I remained seated, not the least bit alarmed. “Sit down, Tyson. You’re acting like a child,” I said absently, wondering when the ten minutes would be up.

Tyson _barked_.

Every other omega in the room hit the deck, falling out of chairs and crying out in alarm and shock, and several betas whipped their heads in our direction, alerted by the sound. Two of the other alphas cringed with a snarl, and the third simply bared his teeth.

The Soldier _roared_ back.

It was like all the warmth was sucked out of the air, like a thick weight had landed on every shoulder in the room and crushed them to the ground. The other omegas, and most of the betas, lost consciousness entirely. The sound echoed, bouncing off itself until there was nothing but that deep, guttural, _bestial_ roar. It was like having a tiger, or maybe a dragon, suddenly translocated into the room.

It was pure rage given voice. Sheer anger at the _gall_ of this _lesser alpha_ that _dared_ assert itself over _his omega_.

It was like having a livewire jacked right into my brain. Time slowed. Everything was moving as if through molasses. Everything except for the Soldier, who seemed to have _sped up_ in direct contrast to _literally_ _everything else_. He seemed to glitch through reality to appear by Tyson’s side, metal hand clamped around his throat and—yep those were definitely _fangs_ —teeth bared in a bone-chilling snarl.

Then Tyson’s head was planted through the table, heralded by the sharp _crack_ of bones (and plywood) breaking and a staccato growl that was only matched by the sheer _ice_ in the Soldier’s eyes.

I sucked in a gasping breath, realizing I’d been holding it for this entire confrontation. The scent of the Soldier’s rut was _everywhere_. It was burning wood, rich chocolate, marshmallows dripping onto hot coals. I clamped my teeth shut on an honest-to-God _moan_.

The Soldier whipped his head in my direction, eyes wild and teeth still sharp, at the aborted noise. Dilated, icy eyes locked on my own and I was suddenly _slammed_ with want. This was… definitely not natural at _all_. I needed to get him— _us_ —out of here, _five minutes ago_.

I staggered up from the chair, not even bothering to acknowledge the unconscious omegas and betas, and the other three alphas prostrated on the ground. Instead, I snatched at the Soldier’s closest wrist—the flesh one—and pulled at him as I walked quickly out of the building. He followed almost literally on my heels, pressed up against my back and breathing down my neck.

This had been such a bad idea. Such a bad, _bad_ idea. I never should have made him leave the hotel room.

At least I’d gotten a little practical experience out of it. Now… to get my rutting, feral alpha back to the hotel room without causing any further incidents…

 

* * *

 

“Simon,” I gasped out as I staggered through the hotel room’s door, alpha in tow. “What…?”

Once again proving his miraculous ability to read my mind, Simon piped up from my pocket. _“Your alpha seems to have become feral,”_ came the unhelpful, bland reply. _“I suggest isolating yourselves immediately.”_

I kicked the door shut behind us, mind foggy and still swimming in the absolutely _sinful_ scent coming off the Soldier right now. I clawed for rationality, breathing through my mouth as much as was possible in an attempt to sober up. At my back, the Soldier made a noise that was just this side of human. Liquid and low and rolling, I felt chills crawl down my spine as every hair not on my head stood at sharp attention.

That was not a good noise. Not for my sanity _or_ my virginity. I whined back, confused and worried and aroused and about a million other obstructive things. Even had I been inclined to lay back and think of England, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Soldier absolutely _could not_ consent right now. He was not in his right mind. He was barely in a mind at all.

So I firmed my stance and tugged him towards one of the uncomfortable little hotel room chairs instead of the much more tempting bed. He let me move him around like a life-sized wind-up toy, and sat heavily in the chair when I pushed at him. The wood creaked dangerously under his weight, which would have made me laugh if he still hadn’t been making that liquid noise low in his throat.

I needed him to stop that, immediately.

I crawled into his lap and winced when the chair groaned a warning, but ultimately held. I tucked my nose into the hollow of his throat and tried to think calm thoughts. If I was calm, I should _smell_ calm. And if I _smelled_ calm, maybe the Soldier would take his cues from me and chill out a little?

The liquid noise rolled over into a smooth purr as his arms—both flesh and metal—came up to clasp around my back, caging me in. Some of the thick (new) chocolatey aspect of his rut-scent faded a little, letting the marshmallows come back. And while that was still delicious, it was far less adept at tempting me into doing something impure to the man while his guard was down.

I sat motionless, thinking of kittens and waves breaking on the shore and the sound of rainfall on glass, as the tension in the Soldier’s muscles slowly unwound. The deep purr tapered off, and the chocolate vanished entirely, replaced by the usual marshmallow-woodsmoke combination that I’d grown used to over the past few days.

I felt a nose brushing through my hair and lips grazing my temple, but the _intent_ behind those motions was missing now. My instincts weren’t ringing klaxon warnings behind my eyes that I was being _hunted_ anymore, either, which was great.

“Calm?” I asked lowly, both to the Soldier and to Simon, whichever might feel like responding.

“…affirmative,” the Soldier replied, voice rough like he’d been gargling glass. I winced in sympathy. Ouch.

 _“The Soldier’s vitals have returned to post-rut baseline,”_ Simon agreed from my pocket. How on earth he’d managed to read the Soldier’s _vitals_ while _in my pocket_ was a mystery for the ages, but not one I felt like digging into right now.

I took a steadying breath, letting myself go slack in my alpha’s arms. What a relief. This whole mess could have gone _way_ worse than it had, so I’d be happy to count my blessings and then lock us in the hotel room for the next week. Although… “Did you… _kill_ Tyson?”

The Soldier growled unhappily above my head, tightening his grip in displeasure. “No.” He sounded very disappointed about that, in fact.

I, on the other hand, went boneless in relief. “Oh thank _God_. We would have been in _so_ much trouble if you’d broken his neck for a little growling, rut or no.” I didn’t really know the laws on that kind of thing, but considering I’d _blatantly_ brought a rutting alpha to a ‘safe place,’ I doubted any court in the country would have been on our side. Plus, the last thing we needed was for the government (any government) to catch wind of the Soldier’s existence.

The Soldier shifted, making the chair groan warningly again. “I… performed to your expectations?”

I lifted my head, blinking. That was more words than he usually used in one sentence. I took a moment to parse out what he might mean, and _thought_ he was asking if he’d done a good job by not killing Tyson.

“Oh definitely,” I reassured immediately, wanting to reinforce this kind of positive behavior. Not killing civilians was a habit I definitely wanted to cultivate. “You were perfect. Flawless. A+ gold star, would do again.”

So maybe I was going a little overboard, but I wanted to make sure the Soldier knew I was perfectly happy with the way things had gone. After all, he could have just shot the guy in the face instead of simply planting his head through a flimsy club table. And it wasn’t like I was in any sort of position to tell him what he could or could not do with his own body, omega packmate or no. As long as people weren’t dying, he had more than earned the right to his own self-actualization.

The Soldier nodded firmly, seemingly accepting me at my word. “Understood. Updating optimum performance standards.”

While I was greatly appreciating the sudden talkativeness, I was about 98% sure that if he continued along this vein that we’d run headfirst into some kind of massive misunderstanding. I didn’t want him to think he was _my_ Asset or anything, but anything I said at this point had the potential to be seriously damaging to whatever his mental state was. Plus, he was coming down from a feral high and still in full rut. He was nowhere _near_ whatever counted as his mental baseline.

“Simon, remind me to come back to this when his rut is over,” I said to my pocket.

_“Yes, mum.”_

In the meantime, I looked back up at the Soldier and leaned back enough to make eye contact. Yep. Still dilated, but no longer shark-like. I reached up to put my hands on his face, because that seemed like the kind of thing you did when you’re about to say something profound to someone. “You’re doing a great job,” I told him quietly. “I’m very happy that you’re my alpha.”

The Soldier leaned into my hands at the praise, chest thrumming with a subvocal purr. “Happy,” he repeated, almost slurring the word. It was bloody adorable, is what it was.

“Very happy,” I replied, smiling at him because that was just a face you had to smile at.

He hummed for a moment, eyes flicking over my face as his mouth ticked up at the corner. “ _Eto schast’ye?_ ” he murmured, Russian accent suddenly thick in his voice.

I beamed back at him, because _God_ did I love that accent. Whatever he’d just said, it couldn’t be anything bad if it made his face soften like that. I suddenly realized I was grinning like a loon at the poor man, and ducked my head back into his chest in embarrassment.

“Very happy,” I repeated under my breath, unable to bottle it back up.

I felt him press a smile into the crown of my head in reply.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Flight of Winter](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15295341) by [northpeach](https://archiveofourown.org/users/northpeach/pseuds/northpeach), [wolfsrainrules](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolfsrainrules/pseuds/wolfsrainrules)




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